Texas: Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched its Starship rocket for the first time on Thursday (April 20) but it failed minutes after lifting off from the launch pad. The largest and most powerful rocket ever built exploded minutes after liftoff 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 were to be ditched in the ocean. The company was aiming to send the roughly 400-foot (120 m) Starship rocket on a trip around the world from the southern tip of Texas near the Mexican border.
Watch the video here:
spacex on blast
“As if the flight test wasn’t exciting enough, Starship experienced rapid unscheduled disassembly prior to stage separation,” SpaceX said in a statement on Twitter referring to the explosion.
Elon Musk also congratulated the SpaceX team on the test launch of Starship. He also shared the video of the launch.
This was the second attempt at launch. Monday’s attempt was thwarted by a frozen booster valve. At 394 feet and nearly 17 million pounds of thrust, Starship easily outpaces NASA’s moon rockets — past, present, and future. The stainless steel rocket is designed to be fully reusable with rapid turnaround, dramatically lower cost, as SpaceX’s smaller Falcon rockets from Cape Canaveral, Florida, have done. Nothing was to be saved from the test flight.
The futuristic spacecraft flew several miles in the air during tests a few years ago, landing successfully only once. But it was to be the inaugural first-stage booster with 33 methane-fuelled engines.
(with AP inputs)