The first test flight of the Spacecraft Explosion from an Unscheduled Demonstration at Boca Chica, South Carolina
At the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on 18 April, the director of NASA satellites said that they are excited about the idea of enabling science with Starship.
Just four minutes after liftoff from the company’s launch site in Boca Chica in southern Texas, when the Starship stage was supposed to separate from the Super Heavy rocket, both the stage and rocket experienced a “rapid unscheduled disassembly”—a euphemism that Elon Musk and his SpaceX colleagues sometimes use for a rocket explosion.
This test flight aimed to go almost orbital. The ship was supposed to fly to an altitude of 146 miles and make most of a lap around the Earth. The rocket and vehicle were to splash down off the coast of Texas on the day after launch, and 90 minutes later off the coast of Hawaii.
The crowd at Starbase in Texas, which cheeredenthusiastically throughout the hour, continued to cheer and clap even as the malfunction became apparent and the stack became spinier and then burst into flames, because they didn’t mind the deviation from plan. Kate Tice said that everything after clearing the tower was icing on the cake. The end of the inaugural test flight of the Starship is exciting.
The company did not respond to WIRED’s requests for additional information about the launch. The launch was included in the FAA operations plan advisory, with backup dates through April 22. Boca Chica Beach and the road leading to it, State Highway 4, are going to be shut down on April 17 with the following days being backups.
The SpaceX rocket made it partially through its first full test. It could change science and astronomy, as well as ferrying people to Mars.
It got off the launch pad with up to 33 engines, which is a significant step forward from what the company has been able to do with its most ambitious rocket. “Starship gave us a rather spectacular end to what was a truly incredible test,” Insprucker said later.
The Super Heavy rocket booster is enough to hold the 120 metres tall Starship. The craft can carry up to 150 truckloads of equipment into space and is designed to be a full reuse transportation system. The cost to go to space will be slashed by the reuse of parts by the company.
“We have always been constrained in space flight by mass, volume and cost,” says Jennifer Heldmann, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “And all of those constraints are basically lifted with Starship.”
The space shuttles were supposed to provide frequent access to space and flew 135 times between 1981 and 2011. But NASA eventually retired the shuttle in favour of developing the more powerful SLS to travel farther away from Earth.
Still, developing any new rocket is challenging, as today’s flight showed. In the near future, there will be another test of a Starship built by the company. This year, we could see a lot of progress. “Or not.”