The SpaceX company's Starship rocket took off today at 3:33 p.m. (Spanish peninsular time) from the Boca Chica space base, in south Texas (USA), but it exploded four minutes after launch.
The first unequivocal sign that the rocket was not behaving as it should have been observed half a minute earlier in the broadcast offered by SpaceX when the upper module of the rocket did not separate from the lower module as it should.
At that same moment, the Starship began to lose altitude, from the 39 kilometers it had reached three and a half minutes after takeoff to the 29 kilometers it finally exploded. The explosion occurred over the Gulf of Mexico, in an area that had been closed to navigation in anticipation that the rocket could explode.
From the first minute of the mission, in the images offered by Space X, it has been possible to see that five of the 33 engines located in the lower part of the rocket had not turned on as planned. Immediately after the explosion it was still not clear if the misfiring of the engines was related to the loss of the mission.
Designed to be able to send astronauts to Mars in the future, the Starship is destined to consolidate SpaceX's leadership in the Earth orbit launch market and to play an important role in manned missions to the Moon from 2025.
Despite the explosion at today's launch, the company will investigate the causes of the failure and hopefully fix them to continue development of a rocket it started working on about a decade ago.
"We have learned a lot for the next test flight in a few months," Elon Musk, SpaceX founder and CEO, tweeted minutes after the rocket explosion.
Failures in the first launch of a new rocket are not unusual in the space sector, since the conditions to which the device is subjected during ascent cannot be simulated in computers.
At 120 meters tall and capable of sending payloads of up to 150 tons into low-Earth orbit, it is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. It breaks the records that have been in force for more than 50 years for the Saturn V, the rocket in which the astronauts who traveled to the Moon in the NASA Apollo program took off.
In today's mission, which lasted an hour and a half, the Starship had to go around the world and reach an altitude of 235 kilometers without actually going into orbit.
The Starship is made up of two large modules. The lower part, called Super Heavy, is a 69-meter-tall silver cylinder, which powers the rocket for the first eight minutes after liftoff with 33 SpaceX-developed Raptor engines.
The upper part, named Starship after the rocket assembly, is both a rocket and a spaceship. With a height of 50 meters, it has a large fuel tank and six Raptor engines, as well as a huge compartment to transport cargo into space. According to Elon Musk, executive founder of SpaceX, it has enough volume for a crew of more than a hundred people.
Both modules are designed to be recovered and reused after each mission. In today's release, however, they won't be recovered. The Super Heavy will return to the launch site but will sink in the Gulf of Mexico off the Texas coast. The Starship module will sink in the Pacific north of Hawaii.
This story will be updated throughout the afternoon as more information about the rocket explosion becomes available.
