My first visit to Boca Chica was in April 2021. As a lifelong NASA nerd I was eager to see what SpaceX was up to. I couldn’t believe how close I could get to the launch site! You could drive down Hwy 4 and the rocket was right there on the other side of the fence! If you drove all the way to the beach and parked, you could climb over the sand dunes and have an unobstructed view of the facility. At that time only the first of the 8 huge ground support tanks had been installed. The orbital launch mount was just some big 3′ diameter cylinders sticking up out of the ground. SN15 (Starship serial number 15) was sitting on the suboribital pad.

It was scheduled to launch soon. It was going to fly up to about 10,000 feet. Then it would shut off it’s engines and pivot so it was parallel to the ground. This was to simulate a re-entry. It would fall back to Earth using it’s flaps to guide it back to the landing area. Then just before it was to hit the ground it would relight an engine, pivot back to an upright position, and land (as gently as possible). Hopefully without blowing up like it’s predecessors had.

It would eventually be successful, but not while I was there. SpaceX would spend the next two years getting ready for the main event. While Starship itself was impressive, it was never meant to fly by itself. It was 30 ft in diameter and 164 ft tall. But it would be stacked on a booster. While Starship has 6 engines, 3 for normal atmosphere and 3 for the vacuum of space, the booster would have 33! When stacked, the world’s most powerful rocket would stand nearly 400′!

During those 2 years, I watched the progress on YouTube. They had static fires of engines. They redesigned the piping for the fuel tanks. They pressurized tanks until they blew up. They just kept improving by trying new things to see if they’d work. Some things did, those that didn’t were redesigned. It was fascinating watching the process in real-time.

After several launch dates were announced and then rescheduled, by the beginning of April 2023, it looked like all the forms had been filed, all of the tests had been completed, and they were really going to “light this candle”! It was announced that April 17, 2023 at 8:20am Starship would make it’s first orbital flight attempt. After years of waiting, I was going to get my chance to see it live!

I got into my hotel on South Padre Island, TX around 3:30am on the 16th. I slept until noon. I knew they were going to close the road leading to the site at midnight, so I drove over to Boca Chica to see it up close.

I was eager to drive down hwy 4 and see the changes in person that I had seen on YouTube. Of course there were many more people that Sunday than 2 years before. The traffic was pretty bad. They already had the beach closed off, so I didn’t try to get on the dunes. In fact, I didn’t really see a place to park, so I just drove down, turned around, and drove back. It was disappointing that I couldn’t hang out and take some pictures, but what I saw was still impressive!

SN15 only had a band of black heat resistant tiles wrapped around it’s waist back in 2021. SN24 which was stacked on Booster 7 was nearly completely covered in the black octagonal tiles it would rely on to protect it during the fiery re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. It contrasted starkly with the smooth silver sides of the booster. It was thrilling to think that soon that huge monster of a rocket was going to fly. I couldn’t wait!

It was hard to get to sleep that night, but I immediately got up when the alarm went off! I didn’t want to pay the $20 for parking at Isla Blanca Park, so my plan was to walk there. It was the closest unobstructed view of the launch that I knew of. I headed off with my binoculars and folding chair to find a place to watch from.

It was a 2 mile walk. I thought that wouldn’t be a problem. It wasn’t! Walking there, that is. It was walking back that was the Bataan Death March for me. Man am I out of shape!

Anyway I got there about an hour before scheduled liftoff. I found a nice place just off the path with just a few people in front of me. It wouldn’t matter once the countdown got to zero. We were about 5 miles from the rocket. It was clearly visible in my binoculars. It looked different from the day before. Now it had a nice frosty coat of ice around the tanks full of super-cooled liquid methane and liquid oxygen. It had billowing clouds of white vapor venting from the sides as it waited like a chained dragon to leap into the sky.

One thing I hadn’t counted on was the lousy 5G cell service. Thousands of people were all trying to stream the coverage at the same time. I couldn’t get any updates. I could hear some of the coverage from other people’s phones who had better luck than I did. It got to about T -40 seconds, when they had to scrub the launch. Dang it! Here we go again!

The walk back was excruciating. I had to stop several times to rest. My legs were just aching all the way up to my back. By the time I got back to my room, I just collapsed on the bed and slept for a few hours.

One of the positive outcomes of pushing the launch to the 20th was that my brother in law David would be able to come down to south Texas and join me. I got us a room at a different hotel than I’d stayed in earlier. It was closer (and nicer!).

When he got there we drove over to Boca Chica to see the construction area and launch pad. Unfortunately it was past dark and they didn’t have a lot of light. It was hard to see anything. Bummer!

After we got back to the hotel we made our plans for the following morning’s launch. Since David was a disabled veteran, I knew he’d be able to park for $5 instead of $20. So we wouldn’t have to walk nearly as far as I had on Monday.

The next morning we got up early and headed over to Isla Blanca park. We were early enough that we got a decent parking place. We then grabbed our chairs and headed for the beach.

We took our chairs and set up on the beach with a mostly unobstructed view of the rocket. It was a little foggy, but really, not too bad. Through the binoculars I could see the clouds of vapor as they fueled the rocket.

Once again, I couldn’t stream the coverage of the launch so I wasn’t sure what the status was. I caught some of the chatter around me and knew that everything was going smoothly. It must’ve been about T-40 seconds or so when they had a pause in the countdown. I was afraid we were going to have another scrub.

But the hold lasted only a few minutes and they started the countdown back up again. A loud cheer erupted from the crowd and I got my binoculars out and started to record on my phone.

As I write this it’s been more than a month since the launch. I’m trying to remember details but that’s a hard task for someone with the memory I’m cursed with. But I’ll give it my best shot.

I remember looking through the binoculars and seeing an orange glow illuminating the Starship from below. Huge billowing clouds of exhaust rolled out and grew as 30 of its 33 engines tried to lift 6 million pounds of rocket and fuel off the launch pad.

I remember watching Saturn V launches and how slow the rocket would rise as it began its journey to the moon. I knew from watching previous videos that it would take 8 seconds from when the first engines were ignited to when they were all at full power and the hold down clamps would be released. But it was strange watching all of that fire and fury, but no movement.

Then the sound arrived. The crowd was cheering wildly, but I don’t remember hearing them after the wall of sound hit us. If you’ve ever seen a rocket launch on video, there’s a kind of crackling sound that rockets produce. But nothing compares to being there. Because you FEEL IT! It hits your chest and you’re just in a state of awe. So much power!

As the rocket finally started to climb, I tracked with my binoculars in my left hand and braced my phone against them with my right. Although it started slow (and a little tilted?) it quickly gained speed and altitude. I noticed an occasional green streak of exhaust as it climbed. This meant that some of the engines were failing. I started to become concerned that it wasn’t going to make it. I was almost looking straight up at it, my body bending and twisting to keep it in view. Was it going to fall out of the sky?

After a few minutes it was hard to see what it was doing. Something was wrong. It was tumbling. The Starship was supposed to separate from the booster and ignite its own engines. That never happened. It remained stubbornly connected. Eventually they triggered the destruct mechanism and it exploded. I don’t know if I actually saw it explode. It was pretty high up and it was hard to make out what was going on.

I’d been waiting for this launch for quite awhile. I’ve been following the development of Starship for years now. While it was definitely exciting, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that it was a let down.

You see I’ve spent the last year planning to get an RV so I could travel between Florida, California, & Texas. I thought I would spend my retirement chasing launches of Starships and Falcon Heavy(s). Maybe I still will. After all, this was not a very successful test, so maybe a successful one would be twice as awesome? Also, one of the greatest things about SpaceX is the booster comes back and lands to be refurbished and reused. However, with the Starship booster there’s going to be a twist. They’re not going to return with landing legs. They’re going to catch it with huge mechanical arms! Now that will be a show!

The reason I’m so excited for this particular rocket is what they’re planning to do with it. First, it’s going to be the lander for the next moon mission Artemis. That’s pretty cool. But that’s just the start.

They’re building a factory to produce Starships on an assembly line. When they’ve finished developing it with prototypes, they’re going to make hundreds of these monsters! The factory will be able to crank out 1 new Starship every three days! Why do they need that many? Because we’re going to Mars! Not just to plant a flag and collect some rocks. This is to colonize Mars. Millions of tons of supplies and thousands of people! If I’m still alive I’m volunteering to go. I don’t know if they’ll want old people up there, but it couldn’t hurt to ask!