They Did It

     SpaceX launched Starship this morning, and brought the booster back to land gently in the arms of the launch tower.  It's a big deal -- and a big gamble.  If it went wrong, they could have been out a launch tower and infrastructure.  But it worked.  (It doesn't take a keen eye to spot the second launch tower, some distance away, a backup I heartily approve.)

     They use a "move fast and break things" development model, one that, consciously or not, mirrors the early days of NASA, when explosive failures were more common than success.  It is quick and effective; it was inadvertent at NASA, where the national-prestige exigencies of the Cold War meant that visible success was more important than figuring out what doesn't work.  And it's impossible to apply to human-crewed spaceflight, at least in the West.  (The Soviet Union took the simpler approach of not announcing any mission until success was assured and Red China carefully avoids releasing damming detail even now.)  It takes a team of outstanding engineers and technicians working long hours to even reach the point where the thing lifts off and fails in flight.  Meeting all of the announced objectives is stunning.

     There's a tendency to give Elon Musk all of the credit for SpaceX's successes, but he never turns a wrench or frowns over a hot CAD schematic; he's a money guy, more owner than hands-on manager, running the big picture while being (per rumor) "managed from below" by President and COO Gwynne Shotwell and her corps of administrators and engineers.*  I am occasionally taken to task for pointing this out, as if it were some diminishment of Mr. Musk's role; but he is verifiably not Tony Stark or Thomas Edison, and there's no Buck Rogers without bucks, nor do you get Buzz Aldrin if there's no buzz.  He courts controversy and engages in partisan politics to a degree surprising for a government contractor and the owner of a social media platform, and maybe you don't get the kind of drive a spaceflight effort takes without that kind of personality.  Certainly Wernher von Braun, another big-picture planner (and able manager of large projects in the manner of Ms. Shotwell) had controversies of his own, and calculatingly convinced two very different governments to support his rocketry efforts.  Sergi Korolev navigated the backstabbing politics of Soviet aviation engineering, was very nearly crushed by infighting, and ruthlessly pursued his goals once he got back into a position of authority.  I've only met one of the three, von Braun, and he was quite charming, but none of them were or are people to turn your back on, especially if you are between them and their intended outcome.  The evidence so far is that you have to be something of an asshole to run a successful space program, and if the PRC's "person(s) behind the curtain" ever step far enough into the light to reveal details, I predict their biography will be similar.

     SpaceX has made a big step in turning their enormous rocket into a practical vehicle.  It is a giant leap in space travel, one likely to outlive all issues of personality and politics.
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* There's an inverse correlation between the success of his enterprises and the degree to which the people doing the day-to-day grunt work are able to lure him away from tinkering.  SpaceX does very well; Tesla, less so, and Twitter, I mean X, is still losing users and becoming a one-sided echo chamber instead of the bastion of free speech he had promised.  Being very, very good at promotion, securing funding and getting an enterprise off the ground is no guarantee of skill in any other area.  No one is without feet of clay or the occasional bout of wooden-headedness.