SpaceX’s futuristic starship looked like it had a touchdown on Wednesday, but then exploded on the landing pad with so much force that it was thrown into the air.
The failure came shortly after SpaceX announced its success. The previous two flights had crashed into fireballs.
The full-level Mars spacecraft envisioned by Elon Musk took off more than six miles (10 kilometers) after taking off from the south side of Texas on Wednesday. It swam horizontally over the Gulf of Mexico and then flipped straight at the descent.
The shiny bullet-shaped rocketship was intact this time on Touchdown, before SpaceX’s test webcast ended, SpaceX commentator John Inspector said, “This is the third time this saying is a charm.”
But then the Starship exploded and was thrown into the air before falling into the ground in flames.
There was no immediate comment from SpaceX on what went wrong. But Kasturi pointed to the bright side in a tweet: “Starship 10 landed in one piece!” RIP SN10, Honorable Discharge. “
He added: “The SpaceX team is doing a great job! One day, the true measure of success will be that starship flights are commonplace. ”
Musk people plan to use Starship to send people to the moon and Mars.
The last two prototypes reached similar highs in December and February, but landed and exploded in Boca Chika, Texas.
These last three test flights lasted six and a half minutes.
