In April, SpaceX, the spacecraft manufacturer founded by Elon Musk, launched a gigantic rocket that exploded roughly four minutes into its flight. Despite the abrupt ending, Musk categorized the launch as a “success,” saying, “We learned a lot.” The Starship rocket, currently grounded by the FAA, is key to Musk’s goal of getting humans to Mars.

Straight Arrow News contributor Newt Gingrich is impressed by Musk’s ambition and considers him the entrepreneur of his generation.

You know, great entrepreneurship doesn’t always start out being successful. It starts out with a big vision, a lot of courage, really hard work, and a willingness to learn.

If you go back and you watch Henry Ford, for example, from the time he built his first racing car, to the time he perfected mass production, in both the Model T and then the Model A, there were lots of innovations, there were lots of experiments. There were a lot of things that didn’t quite work. Thomas Edison once said that there were 49,000 experiments to get the electric light bulb [right]. And then at one point, one of his staff said to him, “You realize we’ve failed 37,000 times?” And he said, “No, we have successfully eliminated 37,000 possibilities.“

Now, that willingness to experiment, to learn from your mistakes, and to keep trying, in our generation, may be personified as much as anything by the kinds of things we just saw with SpaceX. 

Elon Musk created a company of enormous capability. He became the first person to invent a rocket which could launch, go to orbit, come back, and be recovered. Nowadays, the Falcon 9 rocket is, in fact, the most successful carrier of satellites into space. And SpaceX by itself launches more satellites than all of Communist China.

He now is working on his real dream. And in his mind, as successful as Falcon 9 has been, that was a stepping stone; it was the beginning of learning. So he’s now put together 36 rocket engines into what they call the Starship. And they call it the Starship because it’s designed not to take something into orbit — it’s designed to go first to the moon and then to Mars. Now, they just tried their first big Starship launch and it was terrific for a couple of minutes and then it blew up. 

Musk wasn’t bothered by it. As a true entrepreneur, he had said before the launch, “You know, there are at least a million ways this thing can fail.” And he said after the launch, “This will give us a lot of data by which we can learn.“