SpaceX rocket Starship explodes during landing after test flight

SpaceX’s Starship prototype exploded while attempting to land after an otherwise successful test launch from the company’s rocket facility in Boca Chica, Texas, on December 9. The live video of the flight showed the explosion.

The Starship rocket that was destroyed in the accident was a 16-story-tall prototype for the heavy-lift launch vehicle. It is being developed by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s private space company to carry humans as well as 100 tons of cargo on future missions to the moon and Mars.

The self-guided rocket blew up as it touched down on a landing pad after a controlled descent. The test flight had been intended to reach an altitude of 41,000 feet, propelled by three of SpaceX’s newly developed Raptor engines for the first time. The company was left unclear whether the rocket had flown that high.

Musk said in a tweet immediately following the landing mishap that the rocket’s “fuel header tank pressure was low” during descent, “causing touchdown velocity to be high.”

He added that SpaceX had obtained “all the data we needed” from the test and hailed the rocket’s ascent phase a success.

SpaceX made its first attempt to launch Starship on December 8, but a problem with its Raptor engines forced an automatic abort a second before liftoff.

The complete Starship rocket, which will stand 394-feet tall with its super-heavy first-stage booster, is SpaceX’s next-generation fully reusable launch vehicle. It is at the centre of Musk’s ambitions to make human space travel more affordable and routine.

NASA awarded SpaceX $135 million to help develop Starship, alongside competing vehicles from rival ventures Blue Origin, which is owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, and Leidos-owned Dynetcis.

The three companies are vying for future contracts to build the moon landers under NASA’s Artemis programme. The call is for a series of human lunar explorations within the next decade.

California-based SpaceX was buying residential properties in the Boca Chica village, which is located just north of the US-Mexico border in southeastern Texas, to make room for his expanding Starship facilities. Musk envisions it as a future “gateway to Mars.”

Musk has faced resistance from Boca Chica residents unwilling to sell their homes.