SpaceX’s prototype Starship exploded while attempting to land Wednesday after a successful test launch from the company’s rocket facility in Boca Chica, Texas, a live video of the flight showed.
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, “which caused 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.
The fuelhead tank pressure was low during the landing burn, causing the landing speed to be high and RUD, but we got all the data we needed! Congratulations to the SpaceX team!
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 9, 2020
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 space. affordable and routine.
NASA awarded SpaceX $ 135 million (approximately Rs. 1 billion rupees) to help develop Starship, along with competing vehicles from rival companies Blue Origin, the space company owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, and Dynetcis, owned by Leidos. .
The three companies are competing for future contracts to build the moon landers under NASA’s Artemis program, which requires 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.
© Thomson Reuters 2020
Are Micromax In 1b, In Note 1 good enough to take the brand to the top in India? We talked about this on Orbital, our weekly tech podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.
.
