Minutes ago, the Starship spacecraft was launched into space with SpaceX’s superheavy booster, so that this company has taken a big step to fulfill the dream of traveling to Mars. But four minutes after the launch, the spacecraft exploded due to a problem and a delay in the separation phase of the booster rocket stage.
After a problem occurs during Practice wet clothes (a maneuver that allows the operators to control all the stages of the launch before the launch and identify possible defects) On April 28, SpaceX announced that the Starship was unable to launch due to the freezing of one of the pressure valves of the Superheavy booster, and this test for It was three days late.
Today, SpaceX had the opportunity to send the Starship fully into space for the first time in a 68-minute window starting at 16:58 (9:28 local time).
With a launch force of 73.5 million newtons, Starship was the most powerful rocket ever launched by humans. This is almost twice the power of the previous record holder, NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) superrocket.
SpaceX for this flight is from test sample No. 7 Superheavy booster with 33 engines Raptor (Raptor) with oxygen and liquid methane fuel and used sample number 24 Starship. Although both parts of the spacecraft were reusable, their successful landing was not part of SpaceX’s plan for this experiment.
Although the purpose of the launch of the starship was to test its orbital flight capability, the starship did not go into the Earth’s orbit as planned in this flight and only approached the orbital speed.
The full flight of the starship was supposed to be 90 minutes. According to the plan, after 169 seconds, the 33 superhigh liquid methane-oxygen engines would shut down and separate from the spacecraft three seconds later. But due to a problem in separating the boosters, the spacecraft exploded after several times in the air in a spectacular sight.
If that didn’t happen, some of the booster’s engines would be re-ignited to bring it back to Texas and crash into the sea about 32 kilometers off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico about eight minutes after takeoff. The Starship continued its 90-minute journey to the east and Cape Florida, then the Atlantic Ocean, and after bypassing the Earth, it reached the Pacific Ocean.
In the last test, the starship was supposed to Return speed Enter the Earth’s atmosphere and fall to the equator at a distance of 100 km from the northeast coast of Hawaii.
According to a document released by SpaceX, SpaceX plans to collect as much data as possible to model the dynamics of reentry and better understand the spacecraft’s experience in a flight regime that is extremely difficult to predict and simulate on a computer:
“This data will be the basis for any changes to the design or concept of operation after the first flight and to build better models for our use in internal simulations.”
Although SpaceX did not manage to complete this flight program and collect the desired data, it is confident that this explosion will not be a failure, but a step in the development of Starship and Superheavy, and the data collected will be used to develop future prototypes.
