the Starship rocket exploded in flight during its first test

2023-04-17 05:09:06

The largest rocket in the world, Starship, developed by SpaceX for trips to the Moon and Mars, took off on Thursday April 20, 2023 before exploding in flight just before the separation phase of the base and the upper part.

The SpaceX live presenters nevertheless underlined the importance of this flight, which, despite the explosion, “ allowed to collect a lot of data for the next flights ».

The rocket had however been launched without a hitch at 8:28 a.m. local time (3:28 p.m. in Paris) from the Starbase space base, in the far south of Texas in the United States.

The SpaceX team reacted on Twitter to the moment of the explosion “As if the flight tests weren’t exciting enough, the spacecraft underwent a quick and unplanned disassembly before the separation of the stages”.

The failure of a first launch

On Monday morning, the weather conditions were ideal and the filling of the rocket with its cryogenic fuel – liquid oxygen and methane – was going according to plan. But “a valve seemed to be frozen”finally tweeted Elon Musk, the boss of SpaceX, before the postponement was officially announced, less than ten minutes before the scheduled take-off time.

A risky first test

This black and silver juggernaut had never flown in its full configuration, with its super-powerful first stage, called Super Heavy. The flight plan called for Super Heavy to break loose about three minutes after takeoff and fall back into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico to be picked up. The explosion occurred just before this phase.

The Starship vessel should then have fired up its six engines and continued its ascent on its own, up to an altitude of approximately 150 km. After circling the Earth for about an hour, it should have fallen back into the Pacific Ocean.

But this was the “best case scenario”, SpaceX had said, as the outcome of the test flight was uncertain. The main goal was to collect as much data as possible for the following prototypes.

The most powerful rocket in the world

From its height of 120 meters, Starship belongs to the category of super-heavy launchers, capable of transporting more than 100 tons of cargo into orbit. Its take-off power is more than twice that of the legendary Saturn V, the 111-meter high Apollo lunar program rocket.

This inaugural flight was closely followed by NASA. The American space agency has chosen this spacecraft to land its astronauts on the Moon for the first time in more than half a century, during the Artemis III mission officially scheduled for 2025.

The astronauts, who will have taken off on board another rocket, will join the Starship spacecraft placed in lunar orbit. It is he who will bring the astronauts down to the surface of the Moon. Without this “alunisseur”the Artemis III flight cannot take place.

A reusable launcher

In the future, the rocket must be fully reusable. Super Heavy, the lower part serving as a booster, will have to return to its launch tower, equipped with arms to catch it. The Starship spacecraft will have to return to Earth using retrorockets.

This maneuver had been attempted several times in 2020 and 2021. Several prototypes had then descended too quickly, and had hit the ground in impressive explosions – before one of them finally succeeded in landing.