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SpaceX's Starship explodes during test flight

  • Published
    21st Apr, 2023
Context

SpaceX's Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, exploded during the first test flight of the spacecraft designed to send astronauts to the Moon, Mars and beyond.

The explosion

  • The Starship capsule had been scheduled to separate from the first-stage rocket booster three minutes into the uncrewed flight but separation failed to occur and the rocket blew up.
  • Starship Super Heavy has experienced an anomaly before stage separation.
  • Despite the failure to complete the full flight test, SpaceX declared it a success.
Starship
  • Together, the Starship spacecraft and the Super Heavy rocket are collectively referred to as Starship.
  • Starship is a super-heavy-lift rocket and spacecraft that could ferry more than 100 people at a time to the Red Planet.
  • Starship, a rocket and spacecraft combination, consists of a 50-metre tall spacecraft designed to carry crew and cargo that sits atop a 70-metre first-stage Super Heavy booster rocket.
  • Reusable transport system: The system is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable.
  • Being fully reusable means the principal hardware elements are not discarded in the sea or allowed to burn up, as happens with some other launch systems, but return to the ground so they can be flown again.
  • Rapid reusability means that after coming back from space, Starship can be re-filled with propellant and be ready to launch again in a short period of time - like an aircraft. This reduces the cost of the whole enterprise.
  • Collectively referred to as Starship, the spacecraft and the Super Heavy rocket have never flown in combination together, although there have been several sub-orbital test flights of the spacecraft alone.
  • 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.
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