SpaceX’s futuristic Starship looked like it aced a touchdown Wednesday, but then exploded on the landing pad with so much force that it was hurled into the air.
The failure occurred just minutes after SpaceX declared success. Two previous test flights crash-landed in fireballs.
The full-scale prototype of Elon Musk’s envisioned Mars ship soared more than 6 miles (10 kilometers) after lifting off from the southern tip of Texas on Wednesday. It descended horizontally over the Gulf of Mexico and then flipped upright just in time to land.
The shiny bullet-shaped rocketship remained intact this time at touchdown, prompting SpaceX commentator John Insprucker to declare, “third time’s a charm as the saying goes” before SpaceX ended its webcast of the test.
But then the Starship exploded and was tossed in the air, before slamming down into the ground in flames.
There was no immediate comment from SpaceX on what went wrong. But Musk looked on the bright side in a tweet: “Starship 10 landed in one piece!” RIP SN10, honorable discharge.”
He added: “SpaceX team is doing great work! One day, the true measure of success will be that Starship flights are commonplace.”
Musk plans to use Starships to send people to the moon and Mars.
The last two prototypes reached a similarly high altitude in December and February, but slammed into the ground at Boca Chica, Texas, and exploded.
Each of these last three test flights lasted 6 1/2 minutes.
(AP)
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
3 Responses
I feel like the AP writer here isn’t on the regular space desk and just passed by to make a quota.
First sentence, which doesn’t agree with the rest of the story…Actually, let’s just re-write the whole thing.
A new prototype spaceship, but only the upper-stage of the rocket, successfully launched almost six and a half miles over the skies of Texas along the Gulf of Mexico. It then became the 3rd 16 story object in human history to free-fall, from over six miles (airplanes fly 30-40k feet, this is in the hundreds of thousands of feet in the air), and free fell for well over a minute, in a fully controlled upon manner, flipped, and successfully stuck the landing, making history for something that has never been done before, and supposedly “couldn’t be done”.
Unfortunately, about half of the legs that came out failed to lock into place causing a hard landing. One of the tanks cracked, and MINUTES later, an uncontrolled and unscheduled reaction occurred, disassembling the rocket.
The AP, and the rest of them, frustrates me on anything dealing with science, health, vaccines or covid. So there you have it, I just love the program, it’s exciting.
I saw other clips of this and I believe they were aware of some leak which might be implicate din the explosion. Thus this might not be a huge setback if they are aware of the problem.
I really can’t say it is good!
This article makes the test portray as a failure, which is in fact not true. THIS WAS A SUCCESS!!! It landed for the first time ever, a big success. The explosion a few minute later was perfectly fine. The mission was still a success because it was a TEST flight – the fact that they landed it was HUGE! An explosion was expected – even before landing. SpaceX declared success rightfully so.