Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched its first Starship rocket on Thursday morning, but it exploded during a mid-flight failure over the Gulf of Mexico near Texas.
“As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation,” the private space exploration company wrote on Twitter. “Teams will continue to review data and work toward our next flight test.”
The company wrote that with the failed test, the firm will “learn” from its mistakes. “Today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multi-planetary,” it said.
“Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on an exciting first integrated flight test of Starship!” SpaceX wrote.
Live video footage of the test showed the rocket traveling for several minutes before the rocket appeared to fail. The unmanned rocket later exploded in midair.
Musk’s firm was looking to send the nearly 400-foot rocket on a round-the-world trip from the southern portion of Texas, located near the Mexican border. Both the booster and spacecraft were slated to fall into the ocean.
Musk wrote on Twitter shortly after the 3-plus-minute test flight that the firm “learned a lot” and suggested the company will perform its “next test launch in a few months.”
Large numbers of spectators watched from South Padre Island, located a few miles away from the Boca Chica Beach launch site. SpaceX’s first attempt to launch the Starship rocket was called off Monday due to a technical issue.
“A mishap is part of our businesses, and it’s a pretty realistic possibility,” an FAA official told reporters before the launch on Thursday. “We see this quite often with first time launches of new and somewhat unproven space vehicles, (at) the rate of about 11 percent. So to see a mishap here would not be particularly unusual.”
The official added that “our job, of course, is to ensure that if a mishap occurs, that that mishap does not impact the public in an adverse manner. So that’s the focus that we have in our licensing activity.”
T-0 in 4 mins pic.twitter.com/LIMFFjQwXz
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 20, 2023
The company plans to use Starship to send people and cargo to the moon and, eventually, Mars. NASA has reserved a Starship for its next moonwalking team, and rich tourists are already booking lunar flybys. It was the second launch attempt. Monday’s try was scrapped by a frozen booster valve.
SpaceX says it plans to use the Starship to send people, cargo, and equipment to Mars and the moon. Earlier versions of the rocket were sent into the stratosphere.
Both the lower-stage Super Heavy booster and the upper-stage Starship vessel it would carry to space are designed as reusable components, capable of flying back to Earth for soft landings—a maneuver that has become routine in dozens of missions for SpaceX’s smaller orbital-class Falcon 9 rocket.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 20, 2023
But neither stage would be recovered from Thursday’s launch. Instead, both parts were to end their introductory flight to space with crash landings at sea. The lower stage will fall into the Gulf of Mexico after separating from the upper stage, which will come down in the Pacific Ocean after achieving nearly one full Earth orbit.
In February, SpaceX conducted a test-firing of the Super Heavy, igniting 31 of its 33 engines for roughly 10 seconds with the rocket bolted in place vertically atop a platform. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration last Friday granted a license for the first test flight of the fully stacked rocket system, clearing a final regulatory hurdle for the long-awaited launch.
On Sunday, Musk warned that the chances of success were low and said that getting to the separation of the first and second stages during liftoff would be considered successful.
“Starship is the biggest rocket ever made,” Musk told reporters over the weekend. “It’s over twice the thrust of a Saturn 5, the Saturn 5 moon rocket, which is largest rocket ever to get to orbit, it’s roughly twice the mass. So, we’ve got 33 engines on the booster, we’ve got six engines on the upper stage of the ship. It’s a lot of engines.”
He added: “So I guess I would just like to set expectations low. If we get far enough away from the launch pad before something goes wrong, then I think I would consider that to be a success. Just don’t blow up the launch pad.”
Meanwhile, NASA Chief Bill Nelson congratulated SpaceX after the test and subsequent midair explosion.
“Every great achievement throughout history has demanded some level of calculated risk, because with great risk comes great reward,” he wrote in a Twitter post. “Looking forward to all that SpaceX learns, to the next flight test—and beyond.”
Reuters contributed to this report. This is a breaking news article. Check back for more developments.
From The Epoch Times
