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WASHINGTON, Dec 9 (Reuters) – SpaceX’s prototype Starship exploded while attempting to land on Wednesday after a successful test launch from the company’s rocket facility in Boca Chica, Texas, live video of the flight showed.
By Joey Roulette
The Starship rocket destroyed in the crash was a 16-story-tall prototype for the heavy-lift launch vehicle being developed by billionaire businessman Elon Musk’s private space company to carry humans and 100 tons of cargo on future missions to the Moon and Mars.
The self-guided rocket exploded when it landed on an airstrip after a controlled descent. The test flight was intended to reach an altitude of 41,000 feet, powered by three of SpaceX’s recently developed Raptor engines for the first time. But the company was unclear if the rocket had flown that high.
Musk said in a tweet immediately after the landing mishap that the “fuelhead tank pressure was low” during the descent, “causing the landing speed to be high.”
He added that SpaceX had obtained “all the data we needed” from the test and hailed the rocket’s ascent phase as a success.
SpaceX made its first attempt to launch the Starship on Tuesday, but a problem with its Raptor engines forced an automatic abort just one second before liftoff.
The complete Starship rocket, which will stand at a height of 120.09 meters (394 feet) when docked with its super-heavy first-stage booster, is the company’s next-generation fully reusable launch vehicle, at the center of the company’s ambitions. Musk to make humans travel more into affordable and routine space.
NASA awarded SpaceX $ 135 million to help develop Starship, along with competing vehicles from rival companies Blue Origin, the space company owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, and Leidos’ Dynetcis.
The three companies are competing for future contracts to build the moon landers under NASA’s Artemis program, which calls for a series of human lunar scans over the next decade.
Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX has been buying residential properties in the Boca Chica village located just north of the U.S.-Mexico border in southeastern Texas to make room for its expanding Starship facility, which Musk envisioned as a future “gateway to Mars”.
Musk has faced resistance from Boca Chica residents who do not want to sell their homes. (Reporting by Joey Roulettee in Washington; Editing by Stephen Coates)
