Was SpaceX's Starship explosion a failure?

Hello dear friends.

We have long been waiting to see the launch of the world's most powerful rocket built by the SpaceX company, but it exploded just minutes after launch on what was its first test flight, could this be a major failure for SpaceX's plans to provide the ship that will put us back on the Moon?

First Starship test flight. Source: image taken from Spacex Twitter feed.

Starship is a two-stage launch vehicle, where the launch system and spacecraft are fully reusable, was designed by Elon Musk's SpaceX to carry a payload of up to 150,000 kg, putting it in the category of super-heavy launch vehicles, in fact it would be the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, and it would also be fully reusable.

But on its first test flight, launched from the Starbase space center last Thursday, the Starship exploded in front of the large concentration of people who had gathered nearby to see the powerful rocket take off. Fortunately it was an unmanned test and the explosion did not cause any injuries.

The objective of this first launch was to test all the systems of the space vehicle, both the 69-meter Super Heavy rocket that propels the 50-meter spacecraft placed on top, also called Starship, which will be the vehicle for transporting people and cargo. Both vehicles had already been tested separately, and this was the occasion to see the whole system at work.

Starship on the Super Heavy rocket. Source: Wikipedia.org.

Although the rocket managed to take off on the day scheduled for the launch, after a couple of minutes, when the separation of the first stage of the rocket was supposed to occur so that the spacecraft could continue its journey and the first stage could land in a controlled manner, the spacecraft began to rotate without such separation, exploding a moment later.

So far what is known is that the failure may have occurred precisely at the stage of the launch where the two vehicles were to separate, although at the moment of launch some anomalies were observed, such as a slightly slow departure from the platform, but engineers will analyze all the information they were able to collect during the few minutes of flight to determine the exact cause of the failure. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration will also conduct an investigation into what happened.

first Starship orbital launch attempt. Source: Wikipedia.org

The Starship is of great importance in the space race because NASA has chosen this spacecraft as the vehicle that will land with the next crew that will travel to the Moon with the future Artemis III mission, to be carried out possibly in 2025. But despite this major failure, Elon Musk congratulated the entire team for the launch, which he described as exciting and with which they have learned a lot.

So, was it all a failure? Not really, or it depends on how you look at it. We should consider that the rocket lifted off successfully and flew for a couple of minutes, which is no small feat for a rocket built from scratch and designed to be the most powerful rocket in the world, more than twice the power of the Apollo program's Saturn V rocket. It certainly didn't complete the separation of the spacecraft and perform an orbital flight, so it wasn't a success either. But it is the first test, now the engineers will have to analyze the data and correct the failures for the next one, since they already have another unit ready.

For the time being, perhaps the investigations will only delay a little the plans to provide the spacecraft that will serve NASA to put mankind on the Moon again, because with this objective in front of us, there is a lot of pressure to successfully complete the tests of this spacecraft, but without leaving loose ends, because when it comes to space travel, there is no margin for uncertainty.

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Thanks for coming by to read friends, I hope you liked the information. See you next time.

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