The Big Two Went On As Expected

The big two launches we've all been watching and waiting on went off Thursday as scheduled - more or less.  Meaning the first launch, Blue Origin's New Glenn went after a few delays and Starship Flight Test 7 went after about 35 minutes of delays  (hat tip to Scott Manley for noticing something I never did - that the first letters of that name spell out BONG).  

In a strange irony, while neither mission met all of its major goals, Blue Origin had the more successful flight.  BONG made orbit and released its payload, but lost its booster so there was no booster landing  and no recovery.  SpaceX recovered the SuperHeavy booster - another dramatic capture of the returning booster being caught in the giant Chopsticks - but lost the Starship before it reached the point in its suborbital flight where it could do the many tests scheduled for the ship.  

Of the two, SpaceX had the worse result.  While we were all watching the returning Super Heavy booster maneuvering into position to be grabbed in mid-air by the Chopsticks the telemetry from the Starship was revealing trouble as the six engines started shutting down. The telemetry is visible in the lower right hand corner of this video - here's a screen grab around when the first engine shut down. 

You can see the three vacuum Raptors with the large engine bells around the outer ring still running but the inner (sea level) Raptors have seen one shut down.  There are videos that appear to show that the ship had exploded with debris burning up on the way down, like this link to X from Space.com.

While it's easy to pick on Blue for not succeeding at landing the booster, I don't think anyone familiar with the problems involved in recovering a booster that starts out almost at the Kármán line and hypersonic velocity would attack a failure on their first attempt.  SpaceX required 19 launches before it finally landed an orbital rocket for the first time, back in December 2015, and Blue Origin CEO David Limp had said, "Our objective is to reach orbit, anything beyond that is a bonus. Landing our booster offshore is ambitious—but we’re going for it. No matter what, we will learn a lot."

We know that Ship 33 today was the first Block 2 Starship to fly and that there were many changes, but that's no excuse.  We also know that if there's one thing we can absolutely say about SpaceX is that they'll attack this instantly and will let us know what they find soon after they know. 

"Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn. Teams will continue to review data from today's flight test to better understand root cause. With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will help us improve Starship’s reliability," SpaceX said via X this evening.