A prototype of the future giant SpaceX Starship rocket, which the company hopes will become its destination for missions to Mars, crashed in a fiery explosion during a test launch along the Texas coast on Wednesday.
But the company’s line was optimistic as a live broadcast of the launch showed the on-screen message “TEST AWESOME. CONGRATULATIONS TO THE STARSHIP TEAM!”
“Mars, here we go!” Elon Musk of SpaceX founder Tesla tweeted minutes after the flight, explaining that a too fast landing speed was to blame for the accident.
He recounted the successful parts of the rocket’s short journey at the end of the afternoon: the takeoff, the change of position in flight, and its precise landing trajectory (before the explosion).
“We have all the data we needed! Congratulations to the SpaceX team” tweeted.
Wednesday’s test launch took off and climbed correctly in a seemingly straight line, before one and then the other of its engines shut down. After 4 minutes and 45 seconds of flight, its third engine shut down and the rocket began its descent into its expected position.
The engines restarted seconds before landing in an effort to slow the ship, but it crashed hard into Earth.
The smaller prototypes have already been shot several hundred meters (meters) into the air for less than a minute as part of a series of tests aimed at developing the company’s next generation of rockets at the speed of light.
‘Success’
After several failed attempts this week, the flight was streamed live on the Twitter account @SpaceX.
The test flight was planned to check the huge metal body of SN8 (starship number 8) and its three engines for their aerodynamics, even during the return of the spacecraft to Earth, which occurs vertically, in the same line than SpaceX’s pioneering Falcon 9 rocket.
“With a test like this, success is not measured by meeting specific goals, but rather by how much we can learn, which will inform and improve the likelihood of success going forward as SpaceX rapidly moves forward in the development of Starship. “, a statement from the company’s website said, implying even before launch that an explosion or accident would not mean a failed mission.
Construction on the SN9, the next prototype, is almost complete.
The experimental flights are taking place in a nearly deserted part of southern Texas in the Gulf of Mexico near the U.S.-Mexico border, an area empty enough that any flight malfunctions are unlikely to cause physical or material damage.
Musk recently announced that he plans to move to the vast southern US state from California.
Any Starship rocket that is completed in the future will be equipped with 37 engines instead of nine, will be 120 meters (390 feet) high, and will be capable of carrying 100 tons of cargo into orbit around Earth.
Musk hopes to one day be able to launch several of these spacecraft to Mars, although they could prove useful even in the short term, as NASA’s eyes re-establish a continued presence on the Moon in 2024.
Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa is scheduled to pay an undisclosed sum to take Starship for a spin around the Moon in 2023 at the earliest.
© Agence France-Presse
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