THE NEW SPACE RACE: If the next Starship makes it through staging, you can call that a win.

Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, said before the April 20 launch that a successful test flight would mean the rocket didn’t blow up on the launch pad. This time, SpaceX hopes to make it a little further. Ideally, the flight will go into space and reach full duration, a 90-minute trip around the world that will end with a reentry and splashdown of the Starship upper stage in the Pacific Ocean northwest of Hawaii.

Let’s call that a stretch goal. If that’s how the flight ends, you’ll probably hear the hollering all the way from South Texas. It would mean nearly everything worked on the humongous Starship rocket, including all or nearly all of the engines on the booster and upper stage, a daring new method of separating its booster from the upper stage, a brand-new steering system design, the Starship’s ceramic heat shield tiles to protect it during reentry, and complex guidance, navigation, and control algorithms.

It would unlock the next steps in SpaceX’s Starship program. Perhaps SpaceX could meet Musk’s goal of launching Starlink satellites on Starship toward the end of next year. Maybe SpaceX can start demonstrating refueling Starship in orbit, a major milestone for NASA’s Artemis program, which will rely on getting Starship to the Moon to serve as a landing craft for astronauts traveling to the lunar surface.

In June, Musk predicted that there’s a roughly 60 percent chance that Starship will make it to near orbital velocity on the second test flight. The rocket won’t quite attain the speed necessary to reach a stable orbit around Earth, so if it makes it that far, Starship will fall back into the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean about 90 minutes after launch.

At the other end of the spectrum, let’s assume Starship blows up before clearing the launch pad. That would probably set back the privately run rocket program by at least six months. It took nearly that long for SpaceX to repair the extensive damage, but not destruction, at the launch pad following the April 20 test flight. It might even prompt more scrutiny from regulatory agencies, throwing another wrench into SpaceX’s schedule.

It seems to me that getting through the first three minutes of flight would be enough to show that SpaceX is on the right path with Starship.

Godspeed…