The largest and most powerful rocket system in space history to date lifted off from Texas for the first time, but broke up a few minutes later. The SpaceX project was designed so that the spacecraft and rocket can be reused. Entrepreneur Elon Musk is behind it all.
This afternoon (Thursday, shortly after 3:30 pm CEST), the largest rocket system in the history of space travel lifted off from Earth for the first time on its second attempt. A few minutes later, it broke in the air and exploded. Further details were initially unclear.
In fact, the “Starship” of the American space company SpaceX of the tech billionaire Elon Musk should have taken off for a first short test flight on Monday near Brownsville, in the US state of Texas. However, this was delayed shortly before take-off due to a problem with a fuel valve.
“Starship” – consisting of the approximately 70 meter long (initial stage) “Super Heavy” booster and the approximately 50 meter long upper stage, also called “Starship”, the actual spacecraft – enables manned missions to the moon and Mars, but also for operations The system is designed in such a way that the spacecraft and rocket can float back to Earth, land and be used again very quickly. During the current test flight, which was only supposed to last about an hour and a half, they fell into the sea as planned and probably sank – the spacecraft would have flown almost all over the world and crashed near Hawaii.
The SpaceX live stream started at 2:45 pm. At the launch site in Boca Chica, a town on the Texas coast a short drive from the Mexican border, thousands of people camped out to watch. Half a minute before the scheduled start time, the countdown was interrupted: “Things” related to the fuel system still needed to be checked. A few minutes later, the countdown continued.
Photo shortly after the explosion. APA/AFP/SPACEX/DEVICE
And now? Continues!
It was all over about four minutes later: at an altitude of almost 30 kilometers and just before the two segments separated, the system obviously shifted, began arcing, spun around and exploded in a powerful white cloud. The remains fell into the sea.
The hundreds of Space-X employees on the ground were briefly silent, but actually began cheering the explosion. In corporate culture, failure is not seen as a defeat, but rather as an intermediate stage to success, as per the motto: “If you fail, you do it again. And try to fail better.”
Live stream moderators and the starting manager also took a relaxed view of things: “Let’s clean up the starting place and do it again,” he said. Then the live stream ended. So far, no one has wanted to say anything about the possible cause. Observers noticed that some of the 33 launch stage nozzles did not appear to be working; nothing shot from them. The observation was confirmed a little later by a ground control chart.
Elon Musk (51), the South African native and founder of electric car maker Tesla, among other things, is blazing trails with Starship (and the Falcon series rocket models that are already in use) that actually seem logical to future space travel, but it still seems like science fiction in view of the currently widespread technology.
The first thoughts on a massive rocket and spacecraft were made at SpaceX in the mid-2000s and presented in 2010 at a major US space conference. In 2016, the name “Interplanetary Transport System” appeared, also known casually as “Big Fucking Rocket”, linked to Mars as a destination, which according to Musk should be possible as early as 2024. Experience shows that space travel rarely happens as soon as quickly as advertised Then, in 2018, the names Starship and Super Heavy emerged.
awesome reuse
As already mentioned, a special feature is the reuse of both large elements. The real craft must therefore be capable of flying up to twelve times, the initial stage up to a thousand times. In one version, the ship could also serve as a tank to circulate in an Earth orbit and to refuel a Starship or other spacecraft full of cargo and/or passengers – this would massively favor interplanetary flights and lunar flights.
The Starship spacecraft is shaped like a rifle cartridge and is planned – another first – as a multipurpose vehicle. So not only must it fly to near-Earth orbits, to the moon and beyond, but, as mentioned, it must also serve as a space tanker, as a space station provider, it must deploy individual or entire swarms of satellites, and be capable of to land and take off on other celestial bodies. In one variant, it was conceived as a hyper-fast transporter on Earth – it would reach any point on the planet in about an hour. Last but not least, the US military is interested in this, and NASA has co-invested around three billion dollars because they see the rocket as part of their lunar program.
As strong as about 300 Airbus A320s
The focus of the report is usually on the size and strength of the overall system. In fact, the entire Starship is about 120 meters tall, about ten meters above the legendary Saturn V rockets that astronauts used to fly to the moon between 1969 and 1972. The tallest rocket currently in use is the SLS ( Space Launch System), Block 1 version, by NASA or a consortium including Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Aerojet Rocketdyne and United Launch Alliance. It measures about 98 meters.
Size comparison of manned rockets. They are US models only; the old Soviet moon rocket N1 was almost as big as the Saturn V, the Chinese models of the Long March series sometimes come close to the SLS. Graphic News
(APA)