Musk bucks up team as world's biggest rocket explodes in first test flight

In a major setback to SpaceX's ambitious space programme, the Starship rocket, billed as the world's biggest rocket, exploded during its first test flight on Thursday.  

The spacecraft, designed to transport astronauts to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, disintegrated into a ball of fire just four minutes after it took off at 8:33 am Central Time from SpaceX's spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas. 

The uncrewed rocket was supposed to separate from the first-stage booster three minutes into the flight, but it failed to do so, leading to the explosion in mid-air over the Gulf of Mexico.

Despite the failure to complete the 90-minute test flight and reach orbit, Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, congratulated the team on Twitter, calling the test "exciting" and a "success." 

He also acknowledged that they had learned a lot from the experience that would help them improve future flights of Starship. NASA chief Bill Nelson also congratulated SpaceX, saying that every great achievement in history has required some level of calculated risk.

Starship, a complicated and gigantic rocket, consists of a 164-foot tall crew vehicle that sits atop a 230-foot tall first-stage Super Heavy booster rocket. It generates 17 million pounds of thrust, more than twice that of the Saturn V rockets used to send Apollo astronauts to the Moon. SpaceX conducted a successful test-firing of the 33 massive Raptor engines on the booster in February, but this was the first time that the spacecraft and the Super Heavy rocket were being flown together.

The integrated test flight was intended to assess their performance in combination. The launch was initially scheduled for Monday but was postponed until Thursday due to a frozen pressure valve on the first-stage booster. Musk had warned ahead of the test that technical issues were likely and sought to play down expectations for the inaugural flight, stating that there were a million ways this rocket could fail.

The plan for the integrated test flight was for the Super Heavy booster to separate from Starship after launch and splash down in the Gulf of Mexico. However, they failed to separate, and the booster rocket and Starship spacecraft began spinning out of control before exploding in mid-air in what SpaceX euphemistically called a "rapid unscheduled disassembly." The rocket and spacecraft reached a peak altitude of 39 kilometers and a top speed of around 2,150 kms per hour.

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. NASA has picked Starship to ferry astronauts to the Moon in late 2025, the first time since the Apollo programme ended in 1972. However, NASA will take astronauts to lunar orbit itself in November 2024 using its own heavy rocket called the Space Launch System, which has been in development for more than a decade.