The world’s largest rocket, Starship, developed by SpaceX for trips to the Moon and Mars, exploded in midair shortly after its very first liftoff, but Elon Musk praised his teams and hailed a ‘great’ first test flight .
In a gigantic ball of fire, this black and silver mastodon 120 meters high tore itself from the ground around 08:30 local time (13:30 GMT) on the Starbase space base, located in the extreme south of Texas, in the United States, to the cheers of SpaceX employees.
But four minutes after liftoff, SpaceX crews intentionally detonated the entire rocket.
The Starship spacecraft, which constitutes the second stage of the rocket, was to detach from the launcher after three minutes, but this separation did not take place.
“The craft suffered multiple engine failures during the test flight, lost altitude and began to plummet,” SpaceX said. “The in-flight kill system was triggered on both the launcher and the craft,” the company added.
Such a procedure is usual in the event that the fall of the flying object could pose a danger.
Despite this explosion, SpaceX teams welcome the test.
“We managed to get off the launch pad, which honestly was all we hoped for,” SpaceX engineer Kate Tice said during the company’s live video.
The purpose of this test was to collect as much data as possible to improve the following prototypes.
“We have learned a lot for the next lift-off test in a few months,” Elon Musk tweeted.
Starship is both larger than NASA’s new mega-rocket SLS (98m), which first flew in November, and the legendary Saturn V, the Apollo lunar program rocket (111 m).
Starship’s take-off thrust is also about twice as powerful as these two launchers – making it the strongest in the world.
It had never flown in its full configuration before, with its overpowered first stage, called Super Heavy and equipped with no less than 33 engines.
Only the second stage of the vehicle, the Starship spacecraft which by extension gives its name to the entire rocket, had carried out suborbital tests (at an altitude of approximately 10 km).
It was he who was chosen by NASA to become, in a modified version, the lander of the Artemis 3 mission, which must bring astronauts back to the lunar surface for the first time in more than half a century. officially in 2025.
NASA boss Bill Nelson praised SpaceX. “Every great achievement in history has required some level of calculated risk,” he tweeted, saying he was “looking forward” to the next test.
If the planned separation 3 minutes after takeoff had been successful, the Starship would then have had to fire up its six engines and continue its ascent on its own, up to more than 150 km in altitude, then fall back into the Pacific Ocean after a little less of a circumnavigation of the Earth.
But 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.
On Monday, a first launch attempt was canceled in the last minutes of the countdown, due to a technical problem.
The rocket already has customers: Starship’s first crewed flight is to be made with American billionaire Jared Isaacman.
Starship must be able to carry up to 150 tons of cargo into orbit.
But its real innovation is that it must be fully reusable.
Eventually, Super Heavy will have to come back to land against its launch tower and the Starship will have to come back to land on Earth using retrorockets. After several tests in 2020 and 2021, a prototype of the first stage had finally successfully landed.
The idea of a reusable launcher, Elon Musk’s grand strategy, is to cut prices, to drop to “a few million” dollars per flight, he says.
An imperative for the billionaire, who estimates that humans will need hundreds of Starship rockets to have a chance of becoming a multi-planetary species. Its ultimate goal is the establishment of an autonomous colony on Mars.
04/20/2023 22:08:46 – Boca Chica and Medford Colonia (Etats-Unis) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP