Texas: Elon Musk’s SpaceX on Thursday (April 20) launched its Starship rocket for the first time but failed minutes after rising from the launch pad. The largest and most powerful rocket ever built exploded minutes after rising from the launch pad and crashed into the Gulf of Mexico.
Hopefully, the rocket was not carrying any people or satellites on board as both the booster and the spacecraft on top were to be ditched into the sea. The company was aiming to send the nearly 400-foot (120-meter) Starship rocket on a round-the-world trip from the southern tip of Texas, near the Mexican border.
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Images of Starship's ascent from the launch pad, which reached a height of 24 miles (39 kilometres), revealed that a number of its 33 main engines were not firing. The booster was supposed to peel away from the spacecraft three minutes after liftoff, but that didn’t happen. Rather, the rocket with the spacecraft still attached began to tumble and then exploded, plummeting into the water.
Instead of a best-case-scenario 1 1/2-hour flight with the spacecraft taking a lap around the world, the whole thing lasted four minutes. It reached a maximum speed of about 1,300 mph (2,100 kph). Throngs of spectators watched from South Padre Island, several miles away from the Boca Chica Beach launch site, which was off-limits. As Starship lifted off with a thunderous roar, the crowd screamed: “Go, baby, go!”
SpaceX on explosion
“As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation,” SpaceX said in a statement on Twitter, referring to the explosion.
Elon Musk had also congratulated the team of SpaceX on the test launch of Starship. He also shared the video of the launch. Musk, in a tweet, called it “an exciting test launch of Starship! Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months.”
It was the second launch attempt. Monday’s try was scrapped by a frozen booster valve. At 394 feet and nearly 17 million pounds of thrust, Starship easily surpasses NASA’s moon rockets — past, present and future. The stainless steel rocket is designed to be fully reusable with fast turnaround, dramatically lowering costs, similar to what SpaceX’s smaller Falcon rockets have done soaring from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Nothing was to be saved from the test flight.
The futuristic spacecraft flew several miles into the air during testing a few years ago, landing successfully only once. But this was to be the inaugural launch of the first-stage booster with 33 methane-fueled engines.
(With AP inputs)
