SpaceX’s giant new rocket exploded minutes after blasting off on its first test flight and crashed into the Gulf of Mexico.
Elon Musk’s company was aiming to send the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built on a round-the-world trip from the southern tip of Texas, near the Mexican border. The nearly 120-metre Starship carried no people or satellites.Images showed several of the 33 main engines were not firing as Starship climbed from the launch pad, reaching as high as 39 kilometres on Thursday . There was no immediate word from SpaceX on how many engines failed to ignite or shut down prematurely.
Instead of a best-case-scenario 1.5-hour flight with the spacecraft taking a lap around the world, the whole thing lasted four minutes. It reached a maximum speed of about 2100km/h. Musk, in a tweet, called it “an exciting test launch of Starship! Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months.” “It fell somewhere between a small step and their hoped-for giant leap, but it still represents significant progress toward a reusable super-heavy lift rocket,” University of Chicago’s Jordan Bimm, a space historian, said in an email.
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