 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we are joined by D. Raghunandan from the Dell Science Forum to talk about the most recent explosion of the SpaceX Starship series. This time it was the SN10 which exploded right after landing and this was the third such explosion which has happened since SpaceX has started testing its Starship series since December. So Raghunandan, thank you for joining us today. Can you first tell us about this craft itself? You know what does it do, why is it being built? Yeah, so the Starship is a spacecraft meant to be taken for interplanetary travel to the moon or to Mars for example and have enough power so that it can take off from the moon and come back to the earth or it can take off from Mars and come back to the earth. So this is just the spacecraft. It's an extremely powerful spaceship as you can imagine because it must have the power to while it's on the moon or on Mars to take off from there directly to earth. Now if you remember the moon shots with NASA's shots with Neil Armstrong and others it had an orbiting craft and a lunar module which landed on the moon took off from the moon only up to the spacecraft which then brings it back to earth. This guy, this spacecraft is designed to from the moon or from Mars directly boost and come all the way back to earth. So you can as you can imagine it's a very powerful craft but to add to this this is meant to be the spaceship but it will sit on top of a extremely powerful rocket which is also undergoing tests currently and the first prototype flight is still to take place which will actually carry this spaceship to the moon or to Mars. Once it has the spacecraft has left earth's orbit this main rocket will come back in the now by now well established SpaceX tradition of making a soft landing back on earth the typical vertical landing that we have seen which is now common across SpaceX's launches all their satellite launches near earth orbit launches are done that way so you can imagine this spaceship is by itself a big guy and it's going to sit on top of a even more powerful rocket which will be used multiple times so as you said this is the third of these craft which is being tried out there several this is serial number 10 and each of them has gone through various modifications and changes and unfortunately till now we have not yet seen a successful launch we are still to talk about the rocket itself which is not even the first prototype has been tried we since you're going to be talking about the explosion I'll cover some related aspects there right so that's what I was going to ask me asking a next can you tell us about why these explosions have been happening well why is still I can't give a definitive answer till we actually get an answer from SpaceX itself because I'm sure they are analyzing all the what happened and so on but what one can make out from the videos of the landing is this is SN10 SN8 and 9 also had a hard landing vertically when it came back it did not just smoothly land and slow down but it crashed while it landed this guy seems to have almost made a soft landing although there are some doubts on that because at the bottom of the craft are three kind of landing legs which it is supposed to land on none of the videos I've seen you can see these landing legs so maybe there's a problem in deploying those but it seems to have had also a fairly rough landing because it landed and then it tilted slightly so you can see the spaceship being slightly tilted and flames coming out at the bottom of the spaceship so it looks as if maybe the landing was a bit hard it jolted the inner components and structure of the spacecraft some fuel may have leaked from somewhere from the tanks and because of the hard landing and the fire that you see below the fuel leak must have got ignited and led to this explosion right and what we see is that the feedback or the response to these explosions until now has been that these are not necessarily a bad thing that you know this gives SpaceX an opportunity to collect data and to then improve on the technology so what do you think of this sort of response well there's two aspects to it of course rocketry is not an easy technology to master and if one goes back into the history of NASA's rockets into the Soviet launches in the early days we never got to hear about what happened with Soviet launches until much later and if you see even the Indian launches we have had a large number of failures before you finally succeed in a regularized workhorse rocket today for example SpaceX's Falcon rocket or even the Falcon heavy rocket which is now routinely goes off launches satellites or carries crew to the space station and comes back safely so that is now a well-established technology and it is it's now become a workhorse for SpaceX but this also had its teething troubles to begin with it had its teething troubles to begin with so the additional problem with SpaceX and the personality of Elon Musk if you like is that with this spaceship he has set himself extremely ambitious targets his target is to take a manned crew to the moon and back a manned craft to the moon and back by 2023 that's just three years away and imagine where we are today with not even one successful launch so with a looming deadline hardly three years away Musk is clearly pushing it while at the same time innovating in the craft now even under normal circumstances and with any other technology innovation rapid innovation large-scale innovation along with tight timelines is as you can imagine put strain on the entire system and can certainly lead to crashes and I'm sure this is one of the contributing factors to these crashes that we have seen because the team must be under pressure to deliver quickly so one of the to my mind answer to SpaceX SpaceX's troubles with these would be to elongate the time frame if you give yourself time till 25 or 2026 then I think you would see fewer crashes of this nature because after every crash you need to have sufficient time to analyze rectify and then launch with eight nine and ten that does not seem to have happened more or less the same things are happening now of course we don't know the technical details from inside the establishment from inside SpaceX and Elon Musk is notoriously tight about diverging technical details one of the reasons for which is by the way Elon Musk is also a verse to patent it he doesn't patent many of his technologies but in order to do the innovations that he does quickly and usefully he has to keep a very tight lid on the technical information so that's one reason why from outside we may not get too too many technical details of what happens inside SpaceX but as I said I feel that the tight schedule that he has given himself plus the number of innovations that he's trying out on this craft add to these problems one such innovation I'll just as an example I'll give you is he has changed the body of the spaceship and if you see the videos you'll see it glistening and glimmering in the sunlight because the craft is made out of stainless steel while normally one would have gone with carbon fiber or some such but Musk of course as you know wants to cut costs in terms of space launches and he has come to the conclusion that carbon fiber ultimately ends up costing about $200 per kilo whereas he can use stainless steel to build the rocket or the spaceship at about three to five dollars a kilo so he's pushing that as well and that may lead to some of these things because carbon fiber is more resilient and a material while stainless steel can tend to be a little rigid and hard so that's contributory factor so like I was just giving that as an example to show that you try a number of innovations while at the same time you give yourself a tight time schedule I think this is putting too much pressure on the system