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SPACE – This is certainly not the result SpaceX expected. Shortly after its first test launch this Thursday, April 20, Starship, Elon Musk’s company’s giant rocket built for travel to the Moon and Mars, exploded in flight. as you can see at the end of the video above.
In a gigantic fireball, this 120-meter-tall black and silver behemoth ripped itself off the ground at around 8:30 a.m. local time (3:30 p.m. in France), to cheers from SpaceX employees. This highly anticipated spectacle took place at SpaceX’s Starbase space facility in far south Texas, USA.
This explosion does not represent a failure for billionaire Elon Musk’s company: the fact that the rocket was able to take off from its launch pad is already a great success. That’s why the SpaceX teams are still loudly congratulating each other in the pictures of the event. Elon Musk also congratulated SpaceX despite this explosion and promised a new Starship test flight “in a few months”.
However, the cause of the explosion is not yet known. The purpose of this test flight was to collect as much data as possible to improve the following prototypes.
A first attempt was canceled on Monday
On Monday, a first launch attempt was aborted in the final minutes of the countdown due to a technical problem. “This is the first flight of a huge, very complex rocket,” said SpaceX boss Elon Musk on Sunday, calling the test “very risky”.
At 120 meters, Starship is taller than both NASA’s new mega rocket, SLS (98 m), which first launched in November, and the legendary Saturn V, the rocket used in the Apollo lunar program (111 m). The spacecraft’s launch thrust is also about twice that of those two launch vehicles – making it the most powerful in the world.
It had never flown before in its full configuration, with its super-powerful first stage, dubbed the Super Heavy, fitted with no fewer than 33 engines. Only the vehicle’s second stage, the Starship spacecraft, which gives its name to the entire rocket, had performed suborbital tests (at an altitude of about 10 km).
The lander of the Artemis 3 mission
It was he who was selected by NASA to be in a modified version of the lander of the Artemis 3 mission, which must officially bring astronauts back to the lunar surface in 2025 for the first time in more than half a century.
This Thursday’s flight plan was as follows: About three minutes after takeoff, Super Heavy was scheduled to detach and fall back into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. But this separation did not take place, the rocket continued to spin before exploding.
If the separation had been successful, the Starship would have to start its six engines and continue its ascent to an altitude of more than 150 km on its own. After making a little less than one rotation of the earth for about an hour, it should fall back into the Pacific Ocean. But to go through all these steps on the first test flight would have been a real feat.
A rocket that must break the prices of the sector
Wanting to tone down expectations, Elon Musk said it was unlikely to reach orbit on the first try. He’d been content to hope that the launch pad hadn’t been destroyed by the explosion of Super Heavy’s engines upon ignition. “My biggest wish is that we please (…) get far from the launch pad before anything goes wrong,” he said.
The spacecraft must be able to carry up to 150 tons of cargo into orbit. For comparison, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket can only carry a little over 22 tons in low Earth orbit. But Starship’s real innovation is that it needs to be fully reusable — something Elon Musk says will happen “within two or three years.”
The idea of a reusable launcher, Elon Musk’s grand strategy, is to lower prices. Each Starship flight can only end up costing “a few million” dollars, he claims. An imperative for the billionaire, who estimates that humans will need hundreds of Starship rockets to have any chance of becoming a multiplanetary species. His ultimate goal is to establish an autonomous colony on Mars.
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