Starship rocket explodes, crashes after liftoff

SpaceX’s Starship, already towering over the low-lying southernmost tip of Texas, gained even more height early Thursday when it launched on its first integrated test, making it the most powerful rocket in history.

But the rocket also met a fiery end shortly after its 9:33 a.m. EDT liftoff from the company’s Starbase operations area near Brownsville, Texas.

Just over three minutes into flight over the Gulf of Mexico, it became apparent the first stage Super Heavy booster and second Stage starship vehicle weren’t going to separate as planned, sending the combined 400-foot stack into a tumble. It eventually broke apart and crashed into the Gulf.

Aside from the separation failure, it also appeared three of 33 Raptor engines failed to ignite at liftoff.

Despite the hardware issues, Elon Musk’s company SpaceX largely considers the mission a success – teams were initially hoping to see the rocket’s engines ignite, then clear the tower. Anything else meant extra data for engineers to review.

“From a milestone standpoint, our main goal is to clear the pad, (meaning ascend past the 500-foot launch tower without a failure),” said Kate Tice, an engineering manager at SpaceX, during the launch webcast. “Every milestone beyond that is a bonus. The farther we fly, the more data we collect.”

Previously:SpaceX scrubs launch of Starship’s first integrated test flight from Texas

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Had everything gone according to plan, Starship would have cleared the tower, then flown over the Gulf of Mexico. Just before the three-minute mark, Starship and Super Heavy would have separated with the latter attempting a soft water landing. Starship would have continued on to reach an altitude of about 150 miles before attempting a soft water landing of its own near Hawaii.

A previous attempt to launch Starship earlier this week was scrubbed due to technical issues with a frozen valve in the Super Heavy booster, but technicians were able to clear the problem quickly and turn the vehicle around for another attempt 72 hours later.

Back at Kennedy Space Center, meanwhile, SpaceX teams are targeting no earlier than Wednesday, April 26, for the next Florida launch. A three-core Falcon Heavy rocket is slated to fly around 7:30 p.m. EDT that evening, though timelines have not yet been finalized. Neither the two side boosters nor the center booster will be recovered after liftoff, so no local sonic booms this time.

What is Starship?

Starship is SpaceX’s version of a next-generation launch system designed to take humans, cargo, and payloads to Earth orbit, the moon, and Mars.

It’s been likened to something out of science fiction thanks to its reflective, stainless steel outer shell.

The vehicle comes in two parts: Super Heavy, a massive booster outfitted with 33 Raptor engines that will lift Starship, a 164-foot-tall spacecraft that can transport humans and cargo beyond low-Earth orbit. It produces more thrust than the Saturn V rocket of the Apollo era and NASA’s current Space Launch System.

To date, SpaceX is estimated to have spent at least several billion dollars on the Starship program.

SpaceX is using Starbase in Texas for prototyping and building the first Starships. Low-lying and close to the ocean, the area is much like Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center, especially during the Apollo days. Before SpaceX, there was no space industry presence there.

Why is Starship important?

Musk’s reason for efforting Starship and Super Heavy hinges on his belief that humanity needs to become a multi-planetary, space-faring species sooner rather than later.

Musk sees Starship as the vehicle that will help SpaceX fulfill its vision of putting human boots on Mars. He ultimately wants hundreds of people traveling to the red planet in each Starship.

NASA last year awarded SpaceX $2.9 billion specifically for Starship, which is envisioned as the lunar lander for the agency’s Artemis program. If that architecture works out, it will take the next set of American astronauts from lunar orbit down to the surface of the moon during the Artemis III mission. The astronauts will use NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule to reach lunar orbit before docking with Starship, which will be waiting for them.

“As part of (the original) contract, SpaceX will also conduct an uncrewed demonstration mission to the moon prior to Artemis III,” NASA said late last year when it awarded a second contract to SpaceX for Starship development worth $1.15 billion.

So far, the rocket has only made short sub-orbital test flights. An orbital flight is a major step toward preparing for that moon mission which is expected sometime before 2030.

Has Starship launched before?

Previous test flights, which often ended explosively, only featured the Starship vehicle itself, but this time the combined 400-foot vehicle is launching from Texas.

SpaceX began building the first stainless steel prototype of Starship, known as “Starhopper,” in Texas, where it successfully launched on a minute-long, low-altitude test flight known as a “hop” in August 2019. A series of suborbital test flights were designed to stress systems and components to inform the production of larger prototypes.

In December 2020, the much larger Starship Serial Number 8 prototype was the first to successfully launch from Starbase. After liftoff, it sailed to a high-altitude, suborbital apogee and appeared to hover momentarily. Then, it turned around for a “belly flop” descent back to Earth. Though it exploded just short of its landing pad, all of SpaceX’s core test objectives for that flight were achieved.

In February 2021, the Starship Serial Number 9 prototype took flight. The 165-foot vehicle launched on a brief test and automatically throttled down its Raptor engines at about 33,000 feet. It then performed the “belly flop” using adjustable fins to establish a trajectory back toward the launch site. Though the test achieved SpaceX‘s primary objective, SN9 failed to fully flip from “belly-down” to an upright position, causing it to explode on impact.

SpaceX’s third high-altitude Starship flight in March 2021 saw Starship Serial Number 10 successfully complete all objectives and execute the first landing of the next-generation vehicle. But minutes after sticking the landing, the spacecraft unexpectedly exploded.

Starship Serial Number 15 was the first to launch, land, and remain intact. In May 2021, SN15 took off from a concrete pad and ascended to an altitude of 10 kilometers, or 33,000 feet, before using its “body” as an airbrake to descend back to the launch site. Just before touchdown, it rapidly flipped around and gently landed under the power of two Raptor engines – a first for the program.

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