Elon Musk’s Star ship, the world’s largest rocket, explodes on test flight

 

Elon Musk’s Starship, the world’s largest rocket, explodes on a test flight.

Elon Musk’s giant Starship, the world’s largest and most powerful rocket, exploded in a spectacular fireball on its historic first test flight.

The 152m tall SpaceX rocket blew up during the unpiloted* first test flight of the spacecraft designed to carry astronauts to the Moon and Mars.

While exploding about 29km above Starbase in Texas, the launch and 2010km/h flight speed were hailed* as a successful first test flight despite the failure of the Starship capsule to separate from the first-stage rocket booster.

“Congrats @SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship! Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months,” Musk tweeted.

SpaceX called the explosion a “rapid unscheduled* disassembly* before state separation*. As if the flight test was not exciting enough,” the company tweeted.

“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 quality systems engineer added that their goal of clearing the launch tower was their “only hope” for the first launch of the rocket.

The US space agency NASA has picked the Starship spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the Moon in late 2025 — a mission known as Artemis III — for the first time since the Apollo program ended in 1972.

Starship consists of a 50m tall spacecraft designed to carry crew and cargo that sits atop a 230 foot tall (70m) first-stage Super Heavy booster rocket.

SpaceX conducted a successful test-firing of the 33 massive Raptor engines on the first-stage booster in February but the Starship spacecraft and the Super Heavy rocket were being flown together for the first time.

The integrated test flight was intended to assess their performance in combination.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk had warned ahead of the launch 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.

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