Launch of the Starship rocket ©Belga
Shortly after taking off in Texas, the huge Starship rocket, developed by SpaceX for trips to the Moon and Mars, exploded in flight, according to the company’s video broadcast.
This explosion does not represent a failure for the company of billionaire Elon Musk, the fact that the rocket managed to take off from its firing step already representing a huge success. The cause of the explosion was not yet known.
🚀 After a successful takeoff, the Starship rocket explodes mid-flight.
📺 #franceinfo canal 27 pic.twitter.com/zArNBqflQD
— franceinfo (@franceinfo) April 20, 2023
In a gigantic ball of fire, this 120-meter-high black and silver behemoth tore itself from the ground around 8:30 a.m. local time (3:30 p.m. HB), to the shouts of joy from SpaceX employees. At 120 meters, Starship is both taller than NASA’s new mega-rocket, SLS (98 m), which first blasted off in November, and the legendary Saturn V, the Apollo lunar program rocket (111 m).
Starship’s liftoff thrust is also about twice as powerful as these two launchers – making it the strongest in the world. It had never flown before in its complete configuration, with its super-powerful first stage, called Super Heavy and equipped with no less than 33 engines.
On Monday, a first launch attempt was canceled in the last minutes of the countdown, due to a technical problem. On Thursday, the flight plan was as follows: About three minutes after takeoff, Super Heavy was to break away and fall back into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. But this separation did not take place, the rocket continuing to rotate before exploding.
If the separation had been successful, the Starship would then have to fire up its six engines and continue its ascent on its own, up to an altitude of more than 150 km. After having made a little less than a turn of the Earth for about an hour, it was to fall back into the Pacific Ocean. But getting through all these steps on the first test flight would have been a real feat.
Next attempt in a few months
Elon Musk had wanted to temper expectations, saying that reaching orbit on the first try was unlikely. He had contented himself with hoping that the launch pad hadn’t been destroyed by the explosion of Super Heavy’s engines at ignition.
After the explosion, the billionaire congratulated SpaceX via Twitter and promised a new Starship test flight “in a few months”. Starship must be able to carry up to 150 tons of cargo into orbit. For comparison, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket can only carry just over 22 tons into low Earth orbit.
Congrats @SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship!
Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months. pic.twitter.com/gswdFut1dK
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 20, 2023
But the real innovation of Starship is that it must be fully reusable – something Elon Musk thinks achievable within “two or three years”. For this first test, it should not be attempted to recover any of the two stages of the rocket. But eventually, Super Heavy will have to come back and rest against its launch tower, equipped with two arms to immobilize it.
The Starship spacecraft will have to return to Earth using retrorockets. It was this maneuver that had been attempted several times in 2020 and 2021. After several explosions upon landing, a prototype had finally successfully landed.
