SpaceX's Giant Rocket Survives Dive to Earth

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Bloomberg Jun 7, 2024 16:25 · 13.1k Views

SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket blasted off to space and mostly survived a plunge through Earth’s atmosphere, notching new milestones on Elon Musk’s path to bringing it into regular commercial operation. Bloomberg's Matt Bloxham joins Ed Ludlow and Caroline Hyde on "Bloomberg Technology."

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Transcript

  • 00:00 Loads of our audience were asking me all morning, because we carried the launch live.
  • 00:03 Hold on.
  • 00:04 The booster got dumped in the Gulf of Mexico.
  • 00:07 Starship spacecraft got dumped,
  • 00:10 a controlled splash
  • 00:11 in
  • 00:12 the Indian Ocean.
  • 00:14 But really, I think the story here, Matt, is the data that's gathered from the process, and that's what was important for SpaceX.
  • 00:20 Yeah, that's
  • 00:22 right.
  • 00:22 And actually
  • 00:23 one of those words you said they're controlled is really important too, that, you know, these were controlled
  • 00:28 re entries and kind of splash landings
  • 00:31 for both parts of the
  • 00:33 the asset.
  • 00:34 And I think that's really important.
  • 00:35 I think what we've seen
  • 00:36 in the the previous launches is very big fire explosions,
  • 00:41 you know, which has meant they've not quite delivered what they hoped to in those tests.
  • 00:44 And also it's added delays to getting approval from the FAA to do the next test launch.
  • 00:50 And you know that they've got this
  • 00:51 ambition to
  • 00:53 launch people on a manned mission to the moon
  • 00:56 sometime on or after September 2026.
  • 00:59 So they want to kind of get anywhere close to that.
  • 01:01 They need to be doing these tests very frequently and getting success.
  • 01:04 So I think the fact that it was
  • 01:06 not perfect, but close to perfect in terms of
  • 01:09 the objectives, I think will help them to kind of speed up those tests and and move towards that objective.
  • 01:14 I mean, clear
  • 01:16 focus of congratulations coming from
  • 01:18 well, the guy who of course ultimately leads this business
  • 01:22 long term, whether it's on a day-to-day basis.
  • 01:23 Elon Musk saying despite loss of many tiles and damaged flats, Starship made it to the way to a soft landing in the ocean.
  • 01:30 This incremental need
  • 01:32 for improvement.
  • 01:33 How costly is that map?
  • 01:37 Very costly.
  • 01:38 You know, this is this program is kind of running into kind of billions and billions of dollars, but yet they've got multi billion dollar contracts with NASA and also with NASA is a really important client for theirs
  • 01:47 in terms of taking
  • 01:48 US astronauts back, back to the moon.
  • 01:50 But also this programme is really important for the Starlink
  • 01:54 business, which is, you know, their
  • 01:57 low Earth orbit satellite business, which you know, has a
  • 02:00 huge number of customers now that may be approaching 3 million.
  • 02:03 And they want to use the Starship rocket to send more and more
  • 02:08 of those satellites up into low Earth orbit over the midterm.
  • 02:11 So, you know, it's important both for NASA and it's also important for the SpaceX
  • 02:15 business as a whole, particularly Starlink.