Blastoff & ‘blast it!’ for Musk
Elon Musk’s SpaceX lost another prototype Mars rocket early Tuesday as its latest Starship test flight crashed while trying to land in heavy fog in Texas.
After a successful 8 a.m. takeoff and brief test flight, the live-streaming cameras on SN11 froze at 5 minutes and 49 seconds as it came in to land — with the silence broken by a loud boom as it touched down.
“Another exciting test, as we say,” SpaceX launch commentator John Insprucker said as he concluded the Webcast.
It was the fourth Starship prototype to crash, with SN8 and SN9 also previously exploding upon landing during their test runs — and SN10 landing successfully but then exploding minutes later.
“We do appear to have lost all the data,” Insprucker said during the Webcast. “We’re going to have to find out from the team what happened.”
Cameras on the ground also failed to capture what happened because of heavy fog in Brownsville.
“Something significant happened shortly after landing burn start. Should know what it was once we can examine the bits later today,” Musk tweeted.
SpaceX plans to send astronauts and cargo to the moon and Mars.
Virgin Galactic unveiled its latest spacecraft Tuesday as it prepares to continue testing ships that it hopes will ferry tourists out of Earth’s atmosphere.
The VSS Imagine is the first of Virgin’s SpaceShip III models, a new class of vehicle that the shuttle builder says will be easier to maintain and fly.
With a design that looks straight out of “Star Trek,” the futuristic ship is covered with a mirror-like material that provides thermal protection and “reflects the surrounding environment, constantly changing color and appearance as it travels from earth to sky to space,” as Virgin Galactic put it in a news release.
The Richard Bransonbacked company says it will start ground tests with the Imagine before taking it on planned glide flights this summer from Spaceport America, its giant facility in New Mexico.
Virgin Galactic is also working to build a second SpaceShip III model dubbed the VSS Inspire ahead of a planned test flight for the VSS Unity, its earlier ship, that’s slated to take off in May.
“VSS Imagine and Inspire are stunning ships that will take our future astronauts on an incredible voyage to space, and their names reflect the aspirational nature of human spaceflight,” Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said in a statement
Virgin Galactic shares rose 3.2 percent to $30.14.
The SpaceX rival rolled out its shiny new spaceship roughly three months after it had to abort the Unity’s December test flight because its rocket motor failed to ignite.
“For us to make the business start to scale, at the places that we’re aspiring towards, we need two things: We need many more ships than we have right now and we also need the ships that we bring forward to be built in a way that they’re able to be maintained in a way that we can have much quicker [turnaround times between flights] than what we have with Unity,” Colglazier told CNBC.
British billionaire Branson first trotted out the Unity in 2016, more than a year after his firm’s first spacecraft, the VSS Enterprise, went through a failed test flight that killed one person and injured another.