Space Xplosion
Tech billionaire watches his rocket engulfed in flames.. then talks of heading to Mars
IF ANYONE tries to tell you that modern space travel is as safe as a drive to the shops, they might want to look at these photos.
They show the moment Spacex’s Starship prototype exploded while attempting to land. Thankfully no one was on board and nobody was hurt.
Tech wizard Elon Musk’s private spaceflight company was performing a test flight at its facility in Boca Chica, Texas, when the accident happened.
The Starship rocket destroyed in the accident was a 16- storey tall prototype for the heavy- lift launch vehicle being developed by Spacex to carry humans and 100 tons of cargo on f uture missions to the Moon and Mars.
The self- guided rocket blew up as it touched down on a l anding pad following a controlled descent.
The test flight had been intended to reach an altitude of 41,000ft, propelled by three of Spacex’s newly developed Raptor engines for the first time.
But the company left unclear if the
rocket had fl own that high. After the accident, Musk tweeted that the rocket’s “fuel header tank pressure was low” during descent, “causing touchdown velocity to be high”.
Incredibly, the South African billionaire, who is also boss of the Tesla electric car company, then hailed the rocket a success, adding in a tweet: “Mars, here we come!!”
Spacex made its first attempt to launch Starship on Tuesday but a problem with its engines forced it to be called off one second before lift- off. The complete Starship rocket, which will stand 394 ft tall when mated with its super- heavy first- stage booster, is the company’s next- generation fully reusable launch vehicle – the centre of Musk’s ambitions to make human space travel more affordable and routine.
NASA awarded Spacex £ 100million to help develop Starship, alongside competing vehicles from rival ventures Blue Origin, owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, and Lei dosowned Dynetics.
The three companies are vying for future contracts to build the Moon landers under NASA’ s Arte mis programme, which calls for a series of human lunar explorations within the next decade.
California- based Spacex has been buying up residential properties in Boca Chi ca just north of the US- Mexico border in south- eastern Texas to make room for expanding Starship facilities, which Musk envisions as a future “gateway to Mars”.
In May, Spacex ’s Crew Dragon Demo- 2 carried NASA astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken to the International Space Station.