![]() “If Serial Number 10 blows up, you have Serial Number 11 waiting in the wings. “SpaceX is designing vehicles that you can rapidly prototype,” says Garrett Erin Reisman, a professor at the University of Southern California and a former NASA astronaut and SpaceX employee. Among the flaming wreckage, Elon Musk’s company has made more engineering progress than any competitor or government-funded space program. The mantra at SpaceX is a lot different: Build. Traditional development programs design to perfection before testing to validate. The cultural differences between traditional NASA engineering and SpaceX are on stark display at each test flight. In the future, the spacecraft is to be sent to lunar orbit, where astronauts will board for the first descent to the moon’s surface in more than 50 years. There were more than the eyes of spectators and live streamers watching today’s launch-NASA officials are eager to see progress, since Starship is an integral part of the Artemis moonshot program to establish a lunar outpost in this decade. It’s also hard to imagine that state and federal regulators would allow it. It’s hard to believe that a human spaceflight program would rely on repeatedly blowing up rockets and spacecraft. And the upper stage automatically destroyed itself due to an issue in the flight. The booster exploded on the way down, rather than firing its engines again to turn around and set down in the Gulf. The upper stage fired its engines seconds before the rocket’s sections parted, a method called “hot stage separation,” and remarkably, it worked on its first real-world attempt.Īfter this key part of the flight, things began to fall apart. In today’s flight, SpaceX made a change to how this critical separation of the upper spacecraft occurs. For an experimental rocket launch to be considered a success, it must perform better than the preceding test-and during the first test flight, the rocket careened out of control after Starship failed to separate, and then it self-destructed in midair. This launch hit its primary goals, as the wild cheers from SpaceX staff in Hawthorne, California, attested during this morning’s launch. SpaceX’s experimental launches have often featured explosions and mishaps that make people wonder if the test flight failed. “Congrats to the teams who made progress on today’s flight test,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said on X, formerly Twitter, after the launch. While the craft climbed into space, reaching 480,000 feet and just before SpaceX planned to shut down its engines, the automated flight termination system triggered and destroyed Starship over the Gulf of Mexico. The Starship upper stage appeared to be safely on its way to a flight around Earth heading east, to circle the planet and then splash down in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.īut then communication with Starship was lost minutes later. Then the booster exploded as it fell back to Earth, rather than splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico as intended. local time in Boca Chica, Texas, the enormous booster called Super Heavy lifted off and successfully separated from the upper stage spacecraft. Though the full mission was not completed, the launch represents a major step for the rocket, which NASA plans to use to land astronauts on the moon.Īt 7:03 a.m. ![]() In a blaze of flame and smoke, SpaceX launched the largest rocket ever built and sent the Starship craft into space-but then the vehicle was destroyed.
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