Musk’s Long Road to Mars: How Poor Planning Dogged the Development of SpaceX Rocket
Mushrooms in booster rocket engines. Spaceship doors that don’t fit. Elon Musk’s SpaceX may finally be nearing the launch of its most important rocket yet—Starship—but the project has been hampered by waste and inefficiency.
Early last year, Elon Musk stood on a stage near the coast of Southern Texas with a 400-foot-tall stainless steel rocket made by his company, SpaceX, jutting up into the night sky behind him. That rocket was supposed to be the first of a powerful new class of space vehicles, known as Starship, that SpaceX was preparing to blast into orbit, part of an ambitious plan to eventually reach Mars.
But that particular rocket never made it to orbit. After months of sitting outside on the SpaceX launch pad as workers cut old railroad ties for use as a support structure, sawdust collected on the booster rocket’s engines and mushrooms began to spread throughout them, according to two SpaceX employees. The harsh coastal weather also took its toll on the rocket, causing damage that made it even more unfit to fly.
Within a few weeks of Musk’s speech, SpaceX relocated the rocket’s two parts—a ship designed to transport people and cargo and an engine-filled booster designed to lift the ship off Earth—from the launchpad to a kind of cemetery for retired rockets on the company’s property, known as the Rocket Garden.