SpaceX conducted Starship’s first test flight Thursday morning, successfully launching the gleaming silver mega-rocket that could one day carry people Mars and beyond.
About 4 minutes after launch, the rocket exploded – or experienced a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” – as the team attempted to separate the stage.
But the fact that the rocket left the launch pad and flew for 4 minutes is an incredible feat for a first test flight and an exciting first step for the rocket.
Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on an exciting first integrated flight test of Starship!
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 20, 2023
Here’s the incredible onboard camera view as the spacecraft rocketed away from Earth.
As the team attempted to separate the first stage Starship rocket from the Super Heavy booster rocket below, the spacecraft went into a spin and lost control before exploding.
At that moment, the spaceship broke apart.
You can watch the whole thing happen in the live stream recording below.
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This was the second test flight attempt; The first attempt on Monday was turned into a wet dress rehearsal about 10 minutes before launch due to pressurization issues.
The team fixed these issues during the week and recycled the fuel from the first launch attempt.
Launch of the spaceship! pic.twitter.com/4t8mRP37Gp
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 20, 2023
musk tweeted that the SpaceX team learned a lot from the frozen pressure valve.
All systems are currently green for launch https://t.co/VxZOEAD652
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 20, 2023
Starship is 40 stories high. It consists of the spacecraft — a 50-meter (164-foot) long reusable crew and cargo pod — stacked atop a 70-meter (230-foot) tall super-heavy rocket booster.
A successful test firing of the 33 Raptor engines on the booster was conducted in February, but the Super Heavy Booster was anchored the entire time.
SpaceX only received permission from the US Federal Aviation Administration last Friday (April 14) to launch Starship in its full configuration.
Musk previously gave the rocket only a 50 percent chance of getting into orbit on its first test flight.
“I’m not saying it’s going into orbit” Musk said at the Morgan Stanley conference on March 7, “but I guarantee excitement!”
But he gave the rocket an 80 percent chance of successfully reaching orbit by the end of the year.
The ultimate goal is for Starship to become a reusable rocket, just like Falcon 9, one that can take people to other planets and back again.
Of course, Falcon 9 took many, many failed attemptsand a whole lot landing pad explosionsbefore it could repeatedly take off and land successfully.
Now the rocket regularly transports people and Objects to and from the International Space Station.
NASA is also working on its own Mars heavy rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), which has been successful first started in November.
The space agency’s goal is to have astronauts in lunar orbit by November 2024.
Starship will be more powerful than SLS and also reusable. The goal of SpaceX consists of launching a spaceship into orbit and then refueling it with another spaceship so it can fly on to other planets.
“Full rapid reusability…is the profound breakthrough needed to extend life beyond Earth”, Musk said in an interview with the Morgan Stanley Conference. “It lowers the cost of access to space by orders of magnitude.”
“This vehicle could make life multiplanetary. That’s a really big deal.”
Some of the above content has been adapted from ScienceAlert previous reporting of SpaceX test flight trials.
