Miami, Apr 20 (EFE).- The large Starship rocket of the SpaceX company that exploded this Thursday in the skies of Texas (USA) a few minutes after a successful takeoff suffered the shutdown of several engines during an ascent that raised it up to 39 kilometers over the Gulf of Mexico, in a test that was considered a success despite not being completed.
SpaceX reported in a brief update statement on the Internet that the Starship took off from its base called Starbase, located on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, at 8:33 a.m. local time (13:33 GMT) “with success from the launch pad orbital for the first time.
The owner of SpaceX, the billionaire Elon Musk, had reacted a few minutes after takeoff on his Twitter account to congratulate his teams and encourage them to continue working on a project whose ultimate goal is to have a device that takes humans to the Moon and Mars.
SpaceX, which qualifies that today’s takeoff was “the highest of any Starship to date”, details that the rocket “experienced several engines shutdown during the flight test, lost altitude and began to spin”, without offering further details. .
“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today we learned a lot about the vehicle and ground systems that will help us improve on future Starship flights,” the statement concluded.
“The teams will continue to review the data and work towards our next flight test,” Spacex specified on its Twitter account, adding that the “Starship underwent rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation,” without entering into details and not specify if it was caused by the engineers.
Musk had anticipated shortly after the explosion that a next attempt could be coming in months.
Both the company and experts congratulated themselves on a first attempt that served to draw consequences, while the specialized media Space.com pointed out in one of its reports that the company’s engineers caused the explosion by detecting the failure of several engines.
Today’s test is considered a very important step for the Starship, which took off in its second attempt -after Monday’s failure- to test the large rocket, designed to transport people to Earth orbit, the Moon and Mars, which will It consists of a ship (Starship) and a thruster (Super Heavy Rocket) integrated.
Today’s test was met with countless congratulations, such as that of Bill Nelson, administrator of NASA, the US agency for which SpaceX works, who said on Twitter: “Congratulations to SpaceX on the first integrated Starship flight test.”
“Every great achievement throughout history has required some level of calculated risk, because with great risk comes great reward,” he stressed.
Billionaire Hassan Sajwani of the United Arab Emirates, one of the richest men in the world through the DAMAC company, said today’s step served to make Starship a hope of “becoming interplanetary species.”
Although in the first moments of takeoff it seemed that everything was going according to plan, the rocket began to spin on its axis and instead of separating, as programmed in the first stage of the flight, the ship ended up exploding and without finish the 90 minute voyage before splashing down near Hawaii.
The height of the huge rocket and ship is 120 meters (394 feet), the diameter is 9 meters (29.5 feet), and it can carry 100 to 150 metric tons of payload, extendable to 250 tons.
