Elon Musk’s SpaceX company’s mammoth new rocket, Starship, has exploded on its maiden flight.
No-one was hurt in the uncrewed test that lifted off from Texas’ east coast on Thursday morning local time.
After two to three minutes into the flight, the rocket, the biggest ever developed, started to tumble out of control and was soon destroyed by onboard charges.
Mr Musk has said his company will try again in a couple of months.
SpaceX engineers still class Thursday’s mission as a success. They like to “test early and often” and are not afraid to break things. They will have gathered a mass of data to work towards the next flight. A second Starship is almost ready to take flight.
“Congrats @SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship! Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months,” Mr Musk tweeted.
The Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses rocket launches in the US, said it would oversee a mishap investigation. A spokesman said this was standard practice when a vehicle was lost in flight.
With the vehicle out of control, the flight had to be terminated
The entrepreneur had tried to temper expectations before the launch. Just getting the vehicle off the ground and not destroying the launch pad infrastructure would be considered “a win”, he said.
As the rocket climbed higher and higher, it could be seen that six of the 33 engines at the base of the vehicle had been shut down or had flamed out.
And three minutes into the flight, it was pretty obvious the end was near. When the two halves of the vehicle should have been separating, they were in fact still connected – and veering off course.
At launch-plus-four-minutes, as Starship was losing altitude, a large explosion ripped across the blue sky, the result of computers triggering the vehicle’s Flight Termination System (FTS).
“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and we learned a tremendous amount about the vehicle and ground systems today that will help us improve on future flights of Starship,” SpaceX said in a statement.
