SpaceX’s Starship, world's biggest rocket, explodes minutes into test flight

SpaceX's Starship created history Thursday, as the most powerful rocket ever built lifted off on its first test flight. The spacecraft has been designed to send astronauts to the Moon, Mars and beyond. However, the rocket exploded during itsfirst-stage separation.The Starship capsule had been scheduled to separate from the first-stage rocket booster three minutes into the flight but separation failed to occur and the rocket blew up.

The giant rocket blasted off in a ball of fire at 8:33 am Central Time (7:03 pm IST) from Starbase, the SpaceX spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas.

"As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation," SpaceX tweeted.

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However, despite the test launch ending in an explosion,SpaceX declared it a success.

"We cleared the tower which was our only hope," said Kate Tice, a SpaceX quality systems engineer.

"With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multi-planetary," SpaceX tweeted.

SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk, congratulated the entire team on the launch and said that it provided valuable insights for the next test launch.

The test launch was initially supposed to take place on Monday, but had to be postponed at the last minute due to a "technological issue".SpaceX had to call off the test with nine minutes left on the countdown clock. The issue cited was a pressurization problem apparently caused by a frozen valve.

If all had gone well with the rocket on Thursday,Booster 7 would havesplashed down in the Gulf of Mexico eight minutes after the launch. Meanwhile, Ship 24 was supposed to enter space and make a partial circuit ofEarth. Later, it was to splash down in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii 90 minutes after liftoff.

Starship consists of a 164-foot tall spacecraft that has been designed to carry crew and cargo that sits atop a 230-foot tall first-stage Super Heavy booster rocket. The two-stage rocketship stoodtaller than the Statue of Liberty at 394 feet.

The massive rocket marks a milestone in SpaceX's ambition to send humans back to the moon.A successful test-firing of the 33 Raptor engines on the first-stage booster was conducted in February but the Starship spacecraft and the Super Heavy rocket had never flown together. The test flight aimedto test their performance in combination.

Musk had earlier warned that technical issues were likely and sought to play down expectations for the inaugural test flight.

"It's a very risky flight," he said. "It's the first launch of a very complicated, gigantic rocket.

"There's a million ways this rocket could fail," Musk said.

NASA aims to use the Starship spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the Moon in late 2025 under its mission Artemis III. This will be the first time that men will go to the moon since the Apollo programme ended in 1972.

Before Artemis III, there is Artemis II which will take astronauts around lunar orbit in November 2024. The agency will use its own heavy rocket called the Space Launch System (SLS) for it, which has been in development for more than a decade.

Starship is both bigger and more powerful than SLS and can lift a payload of more than 100 metric tonnes into orbit.

(With inputs from agencies)

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