2023-04-20 16:49:00
Dhe eagerly awaited maiden flight of Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX’s “Starship” rocket has ended in an explosion. The unmanned rocket took off from the new spaceport near the southern Texas city of Brownsville at 9:33 a.m. Thursday morning. A few minutes after takeoff, however, it exploded over the Gulf of Mexico. This happened even before the two stages of the rocket were supposed to separate.
In the control center, where CEO Elon Musk was sitting, there was still cheering, and SpaceX tried to put the start in a positive light: “The success of such a test comes from what we learn.” The company will now evaluate the data and work towards the next test flight. Musk spoke on Twitter of an “exciting test” and promised a new attempt “in a few months”.
Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. It is 120 meters high and consists of two parts. The lower stage has 33 engines and has a thrust of almost 7600 tons. The upper stage is the actual spaceship, it should be able to transport up to 100 people and up to 150 tons of cargo. Both stages are designed to be reusable once. Thursday’s short flight was the first test using both parts of the system. From the outset, this test did not envisage reuse.
The plan was for the lower stage to detach from the rest of the system less than three minutes after launch and land in the Gulf of Mexico about 30 kilometers from the launch pad. The second stage would nearly orbit the earth once and then plunge into the Pacific Ocean near the Hawaiian island of Kauai. SpaceX actually wanted the rocket to lift off on Monday of this week, but the countdown was then canceled a few minutes before the planned launch. This was justified with a frozen valve in the first rocket stage.
Musk had tried to dampen expectations of the first major Starship test in recent weeks, saying he saw the mission’s chances of success at around 50 percent. SpaceX has big plans for Starship and wants to one day fly the rocket to the moon and Mars.
For example, a variant of the rocket is to be used as a landing module when the US space agency NASA brings astronauts to the moon again as part of its Artemis program. SpaceX also plans to use Starship to transport its Starlink satellites, which will provide internet connections from space. Space tourists are also to be transported with the rocket.
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