The largest rocket in the world, Starshipdeveloped by SpaceX for trips to the Moon and Mars, exploded in flight shortly after its very first liftoff, but Elon Musk praised his teams and hailed a “tremendous” first test flight.
In a gigantic ball of fire, this 120-meter-tall black and silver behemoth tore itself from the ground around 8:30 a.m. local time (9:30 a.m. in Quebec) on the Starbase space base, located in the far south of Texas, in the United States, to the cheers of SpaceX employees.
But four minutes after liftoff, SpaceX crews intentionally detonated the entire rocket.
The ship Starshipwhich constitutes the second stage of the rocket, was to detach from the launcher after three minutes, but this separation did not take place.
“The craft suffered multiple engine failures during the test flight, lost altitude and began to plummet,” SpaceX said. “The in-flight kill system was triggered on both the launcher and the craft,” the company added.
Such a procedure is usual in the event that the fall of the flying object could pose a danger.
“Calculated risks”
Despite this explosion, SpaceX teams welcome the test.
“We managed to get off the launch pad, which honestly was all we hoped for,” SpaceX engineer Kate Tice said during the company’s live video.
The purpose of this test was to collect as much data as possible to improve the following prototypes.
“We have learned a lot for the next lift-off test in a few months,” Elon Musk posted on Twitter.
Starship is both larger than NASA’s new mega-rocket SLS (98m), which first blasted off in November, and the legendary Saturn V, the Apollo lunar program rocket (111m).
The take-off thrust of Starship is also about twice as powerful as these two launchers, making it the most powerful in the world.
It had never flown before in its complete configuration, with its super-powerful first stage, called Super Heavy and equipped with no less than 33 engines.
Only the second stage of the vehicle, the ship Starshipwhich by extension gives its name to the entire rocket, had carried out suborbital tests (at an altitude of about 10 km).
It was he who was chosen by NASA to become, in a modified version, the lander of the Artemis 3 mission, which must bring astronauts back to the lunar surface for the first time in more than half a century. officially in 2025.
NASA boss Bill Nelson praised SpaceX. “Every great achievement in history has required some level of calculated risk,” he wrote on Twitter, saying he was “looking forward” to the next test.
Expected explosion
If the planned separation 3 minutes after takeoff had been successful, the spacecraft Starship should then have turned on its six engines and continued its ascent alone, up to an altitude of more than 150 km, then falling back into the Pacific Ocean after a little less than a circumnavigation of the Earth.
But Elon Musk wanted to temper expectations, saying that reaching orbit on the first try was unlikely.
He had contented himself with hoping that the launch pad hadn’t been destroyed by the explosion of Super Heavy’s engines at ignition.
On Monday, a first launch attempt was canceled in the last minutes of the countdown, due to a technical problem.
Slash prices
The rocket already has customers: the first crewed flight of Starship must be performed with American billionaire Jared Isaacman.
Starship must be able to carry up to 150 tonnes of cargo into orbit.
But its real innovation is that it must be completely reusable.
Eventually, Super Heavy will have to return to land against its launch tower and the ship. Starship will have to return to land on Earth using retrorockets. After several tests in 2020 and 2021, a prototype of the first stage had finally successfully landed.
The idea of a reusable launcher, Elon Musk’s grand strategy, is to cut prices, to drop to “a few million” dollars per flight, he says.
An imperative for the billionaire, who estimates that humans will need hundreds of rockets Starship for a chance to become a multiplanetary species. Its ultimate goal is the establishment of an autonomous colony on Mars.