On Friday, May 19, SpaceX released a 20-second video demonstrating that it is already conducting tests on technology aimed at fortifying the ground beneath its enormous Starship rocket’s orbital launch pad. The launch pad, situated at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in South Texas, endured significant damage during the inaugural test flight of a fully-integrated Starship vehicle on April 20. During the test flight, the sheer power of the Super Heavy rocket’s 33 Raptor engines created a substantial crater beneath the pad. As a result, chunks of shattered concrete were sent soaring through the air.

SpaceX founder Chief Engineer Elon Musk shared that SpaceX is actively developing a solution to mitigate such damage. He said that they plan to build “a massive water-cooled, steel plate to go under the launch mount.” The footage of the test shows a methane-fueled Raptor engine ignited with its beam hitting a steel-plate and a massive stream of water. “One hell of a plasma beam!” said Musk when he shared the video via Twitter, shown below. A single Raptor V2 engine is capable of generating around 230 tons of thrust. Engineers must build a strong structure that could support such intense power, collectively, all 33 Raptor engines generate over 17 million pounds of thrust!

Regarding launch pad modifications –“We’re going to put down a lot of steel” under the launch tower before the next Starship flight with a water flame diverter system, Musk said during a Subscriber-only Twitter Spaces discussion on April 29. “We certainly didn’t expect” to destroy the concrete under the launch pad during the flight test, he said (pictured below). He speculates that the crater was caused due to “compressed the sand underneath the concrete to such a degree that the concrete effectively bent and then cracked.”

NASA on Friday announced the second spacecraft it hopes will help return astronauts to the surface of the moon later this decade. Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander joins the SpaceX Starship as the two vehicles the space agency aims to use for its Artemis program to once again put boots on lunar regolith.

Over a half-century after NASA used a massive investment of US GDP to fund the Apollo program and build the Saturn V rocket, humanity’s next chapter in space is largely in the hands of two of the richest men in the world, SpaceX founder and chief twit Elon Musk and Amazon and Blue Origin head Jeff Bezos.

The shift in the provenance of Apollo’s mission architecture versus that of Artemis is, at the very least, a symbolic representation of a key shift in American society over the last few generations. Hot off the heels of successful collective action in Europe and elsewhere during World War II, the Americans again came together to catch up to — and then surpass — the Soviet Union in the space race.