Enlarge this image The SpaceX Starship lifts off from the launchpad during a flight test from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, on April 20, 2023. Four minutes into its flight, it exploded over the Gulf of Mexico. PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Why SpaceX staff cheered when the Starship rocket exploded Starship is a radically different kind of rocket, and as such nobody really expected it to work perfectly on the first try, says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian who tracks the space business. "Starship overall is just a huge design departure from the things that have been done before," he says. But that also means SpaceX will likely have to launch multiple prototypes at great cost in order to get it to work. Speaking on Twitter late last week, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the company would spend around $2 billion this year alone developing the rocket. McDowell and other analysts who closely watch the space industry say that the ship's success will come down to whether SpaceX has the cash to keep development going: "It depends how many of them you can afford to throw away," he says. "It's all about the money." Fly me to the moon Starship is a stainless steel beast of a machine. At nearly 400 feet tall, it's bigger than the Saturn V rocket that carried Apollo astronauts to the moon. The 33 engines in its first stage put out more thrust than any other rocket. It uses unconventional materials and fuel with the goal of becoming a cheap, fully reusable launch vehicle that could one day carry people to other worlds. Sponsor Message Given all that, the outcome of the first test was "roughly what I expected," Elon Musk said during the Twitter event on April 29.