Texas, April 20 (BNA): SpaceX’s new giant rocket exploded minutes after it launched its first test flight on Thursday and crashed into the Gulf of Mexico.
Elon Musk’s company has been aiming to send its 400-foot (120-meter) Starship on a trip around the world from the southern tip of Texas, near the Mexican border. The Associated Press (AP) reported that it was not carrying any people or satellites.
The images showed that many of the 33 main engines were not firing when the missile leaped off the launch pad and reached an altitude of 24 miles (39 kilometers). There was no immediate word from SpaceX on how many engines failed to ignite or shut down prematurely.
The booster was supposed to yank away from the spacecraft minutes after liftoff, but that did not happen. The missile began to fall and then exploded four minutes into the flight, plunging into the bay.
After separating, the spacecraft was supposed to attempt to circle the globe, before crashing into the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.
Crowds of onlookers watched from South Padre Island, several miles from the once off-limits Boca Chica Beach launch site. As he took off, the crowd shouted, “Go, baby, go!”
Musk called it in a tweet, “Exciting launch experience for Starship! I learned so much for my next test launch in a few months.”
In the weeks leading up to the flight, Musk gave 50-50 odds that the spacecraft would reach orbit.
“You never know exactly what’s going to happen,” engineer John Innsbrucker, commenting on the live feed from SpaceX, said. “But as promised, excitement is guaranteed and Starship has given us a rather spectacular ending.”
The company plans to use the Starship to send people and cargo to the Moon, and eventually to Mars. NASA has booked a Starship for its next team to walk on the moon, and wealthy tourists are already booking lunar flights.
It was the second launch attempt. Monday’s attempt was canceled by a frozen booster valve.
At 394 feet and nearly 17 million pounds of thrust, the spacecraft easily outpace NASA’s moon rockets–past, present, and future. The stainless steel rocket is designed to be fully reusable with a quick turnaround, which lowers costs significantly, similar to what SpaceX’s smaller Falcon rockets did to soar from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Nothing was preserved from the test flight.
The futuristic spacecraft flew several miles in the air during a test a few years ago, landing successfully only once. But this was to be the inaugural launch of the first stage of a booster with 33 methane-fueled engines.
SpaceX has more boosters and spacecraft lined up for more test flights. Musk wants to launch them in quick succession, so he can start using Starships to launch satellites into low Earth orbit and then put people on board.
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