Elon Musk’s willingness to fail captures the American Dream

You know that times are strange when the few uplifting events of recent months involve explosions, fireballs, and lethal debris. Another catastrophic failure happened again on Wednesday night in Boca Chica, Texas, and it was wonderful to behold. SN10, the third of Elon Musk’s Starship prototypes, exploded shortly after landing. If you ever wondered what it was like seeing Michelangelo struggling with scaffolding or Leonardo fretting about the bits of cadaver lying around his studio, then here we see another practical demonstration of genius in action. It was a huge step forwards towards our future in space.

Watching the Starship programme evolve, it has been notable, predictable, yet still disappointing how many in the media have struggled to report it. “Watch SpaceX’s Mars rocket prototype crash land… again,” CNN reported last month. The Guardian, unfairly characterised Wednesday’s launch as “Starship SN10 rocket launches, lands, sits there, blows up.” The tone is often sneering towards Musk, a divisive figure certainly, but one whose standing as a great innovator has yet to prove unjustified. The regularity of the fireballs and debris isn’t a sign of a failure but a measure of a system functioning around Musk’s mantra that “if you’re not failing, you’re not innovating”.

Musk is approaching the business of rocket development in a way that is fundamentally different to how it has traditionally been done. While Jeff Bezos’ “Blue Origin” follows a more typical model – long build times, kept well out of the public eye, with occasional public tests – Musk is using “rapid prototyping” to build and launch his rockets on a near-monthly basis. It’s a process that involves the speedy construction of each vehicle and, for the moment at least, even speedier deconstruction. In effect, what Musk is developing is less of a rocket system and more of a production line for building rocket systems.

Musk came out of the world of software engineering (he was one of the original brains behind PayPal) where rapid prototyping is more typically the approach to development. It is an extension of “double-loop learning”, a methodology often deployed in businesses by which the experiences of the business change the paradigms of that business.

One way of thinking of “single loop” versus “double-loop” learning is America’s constitutional democracy. Originalists follow a single-loop model. The Constitution defines the democratic system and changes to that system can only occur within the guidelines defined by that model, with the obvious problems that result (the Founding Fathers never imagined the world of cheap-to-buy AR15 assault rifles, for example, or a president working with foreign powers to influence elections). Double-loop learning is akin to the Living Constitution, where experiences of living within that democracy inform the original model, altering the Constitution when it becomes obvious there are omissions or flaws.

What Musk is doing, in effect, is demonstrating one version of the American Dream, where business refuses to be defined by the dogmas that came before it. The freedom (hardly a more American term) to innovate means that failure isn’t just permissible but welcome. Engineers push the technology to the limits of what is possible and then achieve what seemed impossible.

For Starship, that means building the world’s most powerful launch vehicle. The finished craft will use 35 engines on the reusable booster section (similar to SpaceX’s current reusable boosters, but much bigger) with another six on the actual “Starship” itself. Each of those engines will be a “Raptor”, a radical new engine using a “full-flow staged combustion cycle“, long considered the most effective design for a rocket engine but impractical. Before SpaceX came along, only two full-flow engines had ever been built (one in Russia, another in the US) and neither had progressed beyond testing. SpaceX’s raptors are the first to be flown and are twice as powerful as the Merlin engine that SpaceX uses on its successful Falcon 9 launch platform.

This takes us back to the achievements we are now witnessing. To treat these setbacks as failures is to entirely miss what is going on. SpaceX will deliver a vehicle that will be capable of delivering cargos so large that it will radically change the way we use space. It will provide a cheap way back to the Moon as well, Musk hopes, the commercial exploration of Mars. More importantly, it is being done at a truly astonishing pace.

Critics say Musk’s timeline is too ambitious (Musk wants humans on Mars by 2026) but this is the wilful part of his optimism. By embracing rather than being ashamed of failure, Musk has already proved the viability of Starship’s novel “belly flop”, which provides the aerobraking needed for a craft this large to enter the atmosphere from an orbital velocity. Each of the raptors ‘gimbal’, allowing for precise control of where their force is directed. It makes it possible for the ship to glide back to earth before reigniting the engines to flip at the last moment so it can land on its end. On Tuesday, Space X managed this for the very first time, with SN10 coming in for a precise heavy landing. The fact it was standing (albeit with a slight lean) was insignificant. They had proved the concept with a relatively simple ship built quickly on a production line from mass-produced parts.

As to why it exploded yesterday… it doesn’t matter. One of the raptors was probably damaged in flight or by the heavy landing. The only significance of the subsequent explosion was that SpaceX has less work to do dismantling the craft. SN11 is almost complete and will soon be carried to the launch stand. Then it will be the turn of SN15 (SpaceX is skipping SN12 to 14) which is nearly finished and incorporates many of the improvements based on the experiences of earlier flights.

“What a time to be alive,” is used too often to describe ordinary things. Around SpaceX, there is no hyperbole. It truly is an amazing time to be alive. We should cherish every flight and every failure. After all, if learning from our mistakes doesn’t define us as a species, then what does?