SpaceX Starship Rocket Explodes in First Test Flight

Ari Blaff
·3 min read
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The SpaceX Starship — the largest and most powerful rocket ever built — exploded in mid-air Thursday morning after taking off from a launchpad in South Padre Island, Texas, for its first test flight.

Minutes after launch, the 400-foot unmanned rocket, which was designed to transport people and material to the Moon and Mars, exploded.

The initial plan following the Starship launch was for the rocket to conduct a single lap across the entire world before touching down in Hawaii.

Despite the technical failure, SpaceX released a statement on Thursday morning remarking that the launch was the first step in a longer process and should be considered a success.

“As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation,” the technology company’s official Twitter account wrote.

“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multi-planetary. Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on an exciting first integrated flight test of Starship!”

Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder, was on site and expressed similar optimism in spite of the unsuccessful rocket test.

“Congrats @SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship! Learned a lot for the next launch in a few months,” Musk wrote on his social-media platform, Twitter.

Musk recently pledged to donate $10 million to revitalize Brownsville, the Texas border town where SpaceX is based, as locals have begun complaining that the company snapped up the majority of houses in the area.

“This is the type of generational change that can impact the community for a long, long time,” Cameron County judge Eddie Treviño told CNN. “And for a community such as ours, that’s been economically distressed — unfortunately, one of the poorest areas in the country — the investment, the commitment to the community has been a very positive economic development.”

SpaceX was founded in 2002 by Musk with the goal of revolutionizing space technology. The rocket company’s mission is to dramatically lower the costs of space transportation and eventually to help humanity colonize Mars.

In April 2021, SpaceX beat out Blue Origin, a rocketry company founded by Amazon executive Jeff Bezos, and won a nearly $3 billion contract with NASA for its Starship rocket design. The NASA mission is to use the SpaceX rocket to land astronauts on the moon, a first in nearly five decades.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) granted SpaceX’s request last week to permit an unmanned flight test.

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