BREAKING: SpaceX Just Successfully Flew Starship For The First Time, Before It Blew Up

April 20, 2023



The Starship mega rocket, which might one day carry people to Mars and beyond, successfully completed its first test flight on Thursday morning thanks to SpaceX.

The team was attempting stage separation when the rocket exploded, or underwent a "rapid unplanned disassembly," around four minutes after launch.

But it's an amazing accomplishment for a maiden test flight that the rocket cleared the launchpad and flew for four minutes; it's an exciting first step for the rocket.

Here is the breathtaking picture captured by the ship's camera as Starship accelerated away from Earth.

The spaceship began to spin and lose control before exploding when the team attempted to disconnect the stage one Starship rocket from the Super Heavy booster underneath.

Here is when the spaceship started to disintegrate.



With the livestream replay that is provided below, you may see everything that transpired in real time.


This was the second attempt at a test flight; the first, on Monday, was aborted ten minutes before takeoff owing to pressurization problems.

Over the week, the crew investigated those problems and recycled the fuel from the first launch attempt.

Musk wrote in a tweet that the frozen pressurant valve taught the SpaceX team a lot.

Incredible 40 floors high is Starship. It consists of the spacecraft, a reusable crew and cargo capsule measuring 50 meters (164 feet), mounted atop a Super Heavy rocket booster of 70 meters (230 feet).

The 33 Raptor engines on the rocket underwent a successful test firing in February, although the Super Heavy booster was tethered down the entire time.

The Federal Aviation Administration just gave SpaceX approval last Friday to launch Starship in its complete form.

Before to this, Musk had only given the rocket a 50% probability of succeeding in reaching orbit on its first test flight.

During the Morgan Stanley Conference on March 7, Musk stated, "I'm not claiming it will go to orbit, but I am ensuring excitement!"

He did, however, estimate that by the end of the year, the rocket had an 80% chance of succeeding in entering orbit.

The ultimate objective of Starship is to develop into a reusable rocket, similar to Falcon 9, that can carry people to other planets and return.

Of course, it took the Falcon 9 a ton of unsuccessful attempts and a ton of landing pad explosions before it could repeatedly take off and land safely.

Nowadays, the rocket is frequently used to deliver and retrieve cargo and passengers to and from the International Space Station.

The Space Launch System (SLS), which was successfully launched for the first time in November, is the Mars heavy rocket that NASA is also developing.

By November 2024, the space agency hopes to launch people into lunar orbit.

Starship will be reusable and more potent than SLS. The objective of SpaceX is to launch a starship into orbit, refuel it with another starship, and then send it on to other planets.

In an interview at the Morgan Stanley Conference, Musk stated that "full quick reusability... is the major breakthrough that is needed to prolong life beyond Earth." "It significantly reduces the cost of access to space."

"This machine may enable interplanetary life. It is a major issue."
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