tch The Moment Elon Musk's SpaceX Starship Exploded During Test Flight
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".
The gigantic rocket successfully blasted off at 8:33 am Central Time (1333 GMT) from Starbase, the private SpaceX spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas.
The Starship capsule 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.
After a failed first attempt on Monday, where liftoff of the giant rocket was called off just minutes ahead of the scheduled launch time because of a pressurization issue in the booster stage, there was great excitement for this launch.
Elon Musk had been hesitant about the launch.
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.
The eventual objective is to establish bases on the Moon and Mars and put humans on the "path to being a multi-planet civilization," according to Musk. "
We are at this brief moment in civilization where it is possible to become a multi-planet species," he said. "
I think we've got a chance."
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