During the live online broadcast of the flight, the company’s commentators said: The SpaceX Starbase rocket, which was launched from its launch pad near Boca Chica, Texas, after a one-hour space flight, returned to the atmosphere at a speed exceeding the speed of sound over the Indian Ocean, where it was from. Scheduled to land, when the control center lost contact with it.
A few minutes later, SpaceX confirmed that the spacecraft had been “lost.”
That is, it likely burned up in the atmosphere or fell into pieces, and perhaps fell into the ocean.
Thursday's test marked a major milestone as the spacecraft completed several goals set for its final test flight.
But for an unclear reason, SpaceX missed one of the main goals of the experiment:
It did not attempt to restart one of Starship's Raptor engines in space, which the company says will be crucial to its full success in the future.
Elon Musk congratulated his team on the social networking site X, which he also owns, writing: “The spacecraft will take humanity to Mars.” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson also praised the company for the “successful test flight” of the X-plane.
The test was broadcast live on X, among others.
It's definitely successful because it later exploded
The world's largest and most powerful space rocket ever, Starship, has exploded several times during tests in recent years.
In fact, it far outperformed the last two rockets: on the first test flight, in April last year, it exploded a few minutes after launch, and during another attempt in November 2023, communication with the spacecraft exploded. The spaceship was lost eight minutes after launch. The boosters were already separated when they exploded.
SpaceX's goal (in collaboration with NASA) with its Artemis 3 space rocket program is to take people to the Moon in the first step, and then to Mars in the next step.
The 121-metre-long two-stage rocket, taller than the Statue of Liberty in New York, is designed to hold 100 people. According to plans, the spacecraft will be able to deliver 150 tons of cargo into outer space. In comparison, SpaceX's previous Falcon rocket could only deliver a little more than 22 tons of payload to low Earth orbit.
The first trip to the moon in 50 years was originally scheduled for 2025, although NASA later said it expected to postpone the program to 2026.
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