WATCH THE MOMENT WORLD’S BIGGEST ROCKET, EXPLODED DURING TEST FLIGHT

Fri 21 Apr 2023:

Billionaire Elon Musk’s iconic rocket Starship, the largest and most powerful ever built designed to send astronauts to the Moon and Mars and beyond, exploded on Thursday during the spacecraft’s first test flight. Mr Musk said that the next Starship test will be in a few months.

Minutes after SpaceX congratulated itself on an “exciting first integrated flight test of Starship”, the company tweeted that the rocket “experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation”.

At the three-minute mark commentators indicated an issue with the test flight. The rocket began to flip for the separation stage and the rotating rocket could be seen in the SpaceX livestream.

Starship should have separated from the super-heavy booster but the rocket continues to rotate, the commentators said. “This does not appear to be a nominal situation,” the commentator stated after which the rocket exploded in the sky.

Despite the failure to complete the full flight test, 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. “Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on an exciting first integrated flight test of Starship!”

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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