SpaceX’s Second Trial Also Fails
NEW DELHI, Nov 18: Just eight minutes into the space, the second SpaceX’s Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, was declared “failed” on Saturday but was still hailed as “incredibly successful by SpaceX engineers.”
SpaceX launched its mega rocket Starship on Saturday, but lost the booster and then the spacecraft minutes into the test flight. The booster had sent the rocketship toward space, but communication was lost eight minutes after lift-off from South Texas and SpaceX declared that the vehicle had failed.
The trouble cropped up as the ship’s engines were almost done firing to put it on an around-the-world path. Minutes earlier, the booster exploded, but not until its job was done, putting the ship on a course toward space.
The first test flight in April had ended in an explosion soon after lift-off.
The two-stage rocketship blasted off from the Elon Musk-owned company’s Starbase launch site near Boca Chicago in Texas, on a planned 90-minute flight into space. “We have lost the data from the second stage… we think we may have lost the second stage,” SpaceX’s livestream host John Insprucker said.
The 121-metre Starship rocket thundered into the sky and arced out over the Gulf of Mexico. The goal was to separate the spaceship from its booster and send it into space. SpaceX aimed for an altitude of 240 kilometres, just high enough to send the bullet-shaped spacecraft around the globe before ditching into the Pacific near Hawaii about 1 1/2 hours after lift-off, short of a full orbit.
Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. Its first flight in April lasted four minutes, with the wreckage crashing into the gulf. Since then, Elon Musk’s company has made dozens of improvements to the booster and its 33 engines as well as the launch pad.
“As you could see, the super heavy booster has just experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly however, our ship is still underway,” an announcer said. SpaceX hailed today’s rocket launch as incredibly successful by SpaceX engineers, despite the super heavy booster experiencing what is known as “a rapid unscheduled disassembly.”
“Such an incredibly successful day,” a SpaceX announcer said. “Even though we did have a… rapid unscheduled disassembly of both the super heavy booster and the ship.” SpaceX has insisted that explosions during the early stages of rocket development are welcome and help inform design choices faster than ground tests.
“The second launch was more successful than the company’s first attempt in April, and any data gathered from today will be used to influence future modifications to the rocket,” it said. The objective was to get Starship off the ground in Texas and into space just shy of reaching orbit, then plunge through Earth’s atmosphere for a splashdown off Hawaii’s coast. Earlier, the launch was scheduled for Friday but was pushed back for a last-minute swap of flight-control hardware.
During its April 20 test flight, the spacecraft had blew itself to bits less than four minutes into a planned 90-minute flight that flight went awry from the start. The first launch also caused massive damage to the company’s launchpad at Starbase.
(Manas Dasgupta)
