On Thursday, two high-profile rocket launches ended up with very different outcomes. For SpaceX, its South Texas launch of a Starship rocket as part of its ongoing mission to Mars project ended with an explosion in space minutes after liftoff.
Meanwhile, the EU celebrated a successful satellite deployment on the second launch of its Ariane 6 rocket from French Guiana. The project had cost overruns and years of delays, but the successful mission on Thursday was a huge victory for Europe as it seeks to become more independent from the United States on space missions.
SpaceX posted a message to X about the Starship mission, saying, "With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today's flight will help us improve Starship's reliability. We will conduct a thorough investigation, in coordination with the FAA, and implement corrective actions to make improvements on future Starship flight tests." The post pointed to a SpaceX webpage about the mission.
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The French government said there were explicitly political reasons for pushing forward on missions such as Ariane 6. Philippe Baptiste, the country's minister for research, said the presence of Donald Trump and Elon Musk in the US White House is already affecting research and commercial partnerships internationally, according to the website Ars Technica.
"If we want to maintain our independence, ensure our security, and preserve our sovereignty, we must equip ourselves with the means for strategic autonomy, and space is an essential part of this," Baptiste said.
One expert, however, said that space watchers shouldn't view the two launches as a simple case of winner versus loser. Chris Boshuizen, Australian astronaut and founder of the space sector venture capital company Interplanetary Capital LLC, said that SpaceX is still very much the leading company in rocket technologies, specifically with its Falcon 9 division, which he calls, "probably one of the best rocket companies every built."
"They totally transformed access to space with the reusable Falcon 9 rocket," Boshuizen said. "If SpaceX never did anything else after that, it would still be a tremendous success and one for the history books."
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Boshuizen says that government projects such as Ariane 6 and SpaceX's methods for getting rockets into space are two very different models, with the EU adopting a "design design design design design" approach toward a destination launch, which he described as "a vestige of the traditional way of doing business."
SpaceX, on the other hand, discovers flaws through launches, even if it risks losing assets.
"They're moving very fast," he said. "(The Starship launch) was exciting to watch, maybe a little disappointing, but not surprising. SpaceX has been able to get ahead by taking risks."
Boshuizen says that if SpaceX's faster innovations lead to fewer rockets landing in the ocean in the long run, that's ultimately a good thing.
"It is a faster way to get to a finished product. The best simulation of space is actually space," he said.
Watch this: Watch SpaceX's Eighth Starship Flight Test: Everything That Happened in 10 Minutes
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