Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built which was uncrewed, exploded and disintegrated four minutes after successfully blasting off at 8:33 am Central Time (1333 GMT) from Starbase, the SpaceX spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas during its first flight.
The Starship spacecraft that will eventually carry crew and cargo 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 in a ball of fire over the Gulf of Mexico.
The founder and CEO of the private space company Elon Musk, had warned ahead of the test it is the first launch of a very complicated, gigantic rocket and there are a million ways the rocket could fail. Despite the failure, he congratulates SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship and tweeted that they had learnt a lot for next test launch in a few months.
NASA Chief Bill Nelson congratulates SpaceX and says that every great achievement throughout history has demanded some level of calculated risk, because with great risk comes great reward. According to AFP, SpaceX said that with a test like this, success comes from what they learn, and the test will help them improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multi-planetary.
