SpaceX’s next-generation Starship spacecraft atop its powerful Super Heavy rocket lifts off from the company’s Boca Chica launchpad on a brief uncrewed test flight near Brownsville, Texas, U.S. on April 20, 2023.
| Photo Credit: Reuters
SpaceX’s Starship , the world’s biggest rocket, exploded during its first test-flight to space on April 20 from Boca Chica in Texas. The next-generation rocket, which was designed to send astronauts to Moon, Mars and beyond was launched at 8:33 am Central Time (1333 GMT) from Starbase on a planned 90-minute debut flight into space.
While the liftoff was successful, the giant rocket ended in explosion nearly four minutes after liftoff. Elon Musk’s company SpaceX said that Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation and their teams will continue to review data and work towards the next flight test.
On April 17, the debut launch of the uncrewed flight was called off just minutes before the scheduled launch time (08:20 local time) after a pressurant valve seemed to be frozen in the booster stage.
The U.S. space agency NASA has picked the Starship spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the Moon in late 2025 — a mission known as Artemis III — for the first time since the Apollo program ended in 1972.
Starship consists of a 164-foot (50-metre) tall spacecraft designed to carry crew and cargo that sits atop a 230-foot tall first-stage Super Heavy booster rocket.
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Collectively referred to as Starship, the spacecraft and the Super Heavy rocket have never flown in combination together, although there have been several sub-orbital test flights of the spacecraft alone.
SpaceX conducted a successful test-firing of the 33 Raptor engines on the first-stage booster of Starship in February.
SpaceX Starship rocket. Photo: Twitter/@elonmusk
The Super Heavy booster was anchored to the ground during the test-firing, called a static fire, to prevent it from lifting off.
NASA will take astronauts to lunar orbit itself in November 2024 using its own heavy rocket called the Space Launch System (SLS), which has been in development for more than a decade.
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Starship is both bigger and more powerful than SLS.
It generates 17 million pounds of thrust, more than twice that of the Saturn V rockets used to send Apollo astronauts to the Moon.
SpaceX foresees eventually putting a Starship into orbit, and then refueling it with another Starship so it can continue on a journey to Mars or beyond.
Mr. Musk said the goal is to make Starship reusable and bring down the price to a few million dollars per flight.
“In the long run — long run meaning, I don’t know, two or three years — we should achieve full and rapid reusability,” he said.
The eventual objective is to establish bases on the Moon and Mars and put humans on the “path to being a multi-planet civilization,” Mr. Musk said.
“We are at this brief moment in civilization where it is possible to become a multi-planet species,” he said. “That’s our goal. I think we’ve got a chance.”.
(with AFP inputs)
