The SpaceX company's Starship rocket exploded yesterday on its first launch, four minutes after taking off from the Boca Chica space base, in southern Texas (USA). Elon Musk, founder and executive chairman of SpaceX, clarified after the loss of the rocket that the program to develop the Starship is moving forward and that a second test flight will take place "in a few months".
The Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, took off at 15:33 (Spanish peninsular time), five minutes later than originally planned. SpaceX yesterday did not clarify why it froze the countdown just 40 seconds before liftoff or why it resumed it afterward.
In the live images provided by SpaceX, 18 seconds after launch, it was possible to see that 3 of the 33 engines located at the bottom of the rocket had not ignited.
While SpaceX investigates the causes of the loss of the Starship, it is unclear whether the rocket explosion is related to the malfunction of some engines or is due to an independent anomaly. Elon Musk said before the launch that the rocket could work even if an engine failed.
The first clear sign that the rocket was not behaving as it should was seen 3 minutes and 20 seconds after liftoff, when it began to lose altitude instead of continuing to climb.
At that time it was at an altitude of 39 kilometers and flying at 1,647 kilometers per hour. It should have run out of fuel in the lower module, a 60-meter-tall cylinder called Superheavy that propelled the vehicle during the first minutes of the mission. And this lower module should have been separated from the upper module, a second 50-meter cylinder called Starship, equipped with its own propulsion system.
However, the two modules failed to separate and began to fall in circles. They fell ten kilometers in just over half a minute and ended up exploding 3 minutes and 59 seconds after takeoff at an altitude of 29 kilometers.
A mission that was supposed to last an hour and a half and in which the Starship module had to go around the world reaching an altitude of 235 kilometers, but without getting into orbit, ended abruptly. The ship had no astronauts or anything of value on board. The objective of the mission was to record data on the behavior of the device in order to be able to launch satellites and astronauts safely in the future.
At the time of writing, it was unclear whether the Starship spontaneously exploded or self-destructed, since the rockets have a built-in self-destruct mechanism as a safety measure to avoid causing damage if they deviate from the trajectory.
The explosion occurred over the Gulf of Mexico, in an area that had been closed to navigation in anticipation that the rocket could explode. Failures in a first launch are not unusual in the space sector, since the conditions to which a rocket is subjected during ascent cannot be simulated on computers.
"We learned a lot for the next test flight in a few months," tweeted Elon Musk 20 minutes after the loss of the Starship.
The director of NASA, former astronaut Bill Nelson, encouraged SpaceX to go ahead, despite the outcome of the mission. "Congratulations to @SpaceX," Nelson tweeted. “Every great achievement throughout history has required some level of calculated risk, because with great risk comes great reward. Looking forward to seeing everything SpaceX learns, and looking forward to the next test flight, and beyond.”
Designed to be able to send astronauts to Mars in the future, the new rocket is destined to consolidate SpaceX's leadership in the market for launches to Earth orbit and to play an important role in manned missions to the Moon from 2025.
The fact that both the Superheavy module and the Starship can be recovered and reused after each launch will allow SpaceX to reduce the cost of sending cargo or crews into space.
The Starship module is both a thruster and a spacecraft. It has a large fuel tank, which can be filled in orbit from a refueling ship if Elon Musk's vision is fulfilled, as well as a huge compartment to transport cargo and astronauts into space. According to Musk, the ship has enough volume for a crew of more than 100 people.
The 120 meters of height of the Starship and its ability to send loads of up to 150 tons into low Earth orbit make it the largest and most powerful rocket in history. It beats the records held for more than 50 years by the Saturn V, the rocket that launched the astronauts who traveled to the Moon in NASA's Apollo program.
