Elon Musk has been thinking about the launch of his Starship for months. That if the ship wasn’t ready. That the weather wasn’t good. That if there were problems with the fuel….
With all this, Elon Musk announced two days ago that the launch would be on April 20 and that he would not move it for anything in the world. This has taken place today and the result is as good as bad. Or so they wanted to sell us.
Smooth takeoff and mid-air explosion
As explained by the American media covering the event, SpaceX’s Starship rocket exploded minutes after liftoff from a launch pad in South Texas.
The craft, the most powerful ever launched, failed to reach orbit, but it was not a total failure for the private spaceflight company.
Prior to launch, Elon Musk had tempered expectations, saying it might take several attempts before Starship succeeded in this test flight, which was to reach speeds fast enough to enter orbit before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.
The rocket launch and explosion were captured by a weather satellite, GOES-East, managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
It uses visible satellite imagery combined with a particular wavelength band that captures the temperature of the fire.
Starship aims to take humans to Mars
The rocket is the largest and most powerful ever built, and its manufacturer has the ambitious goal of transporting people to the Moon and Mars. It is 120 meters high and taller than the Statue of Liberty.
The stainless steel Starship has 33 main engines and 7.6 million kilograms of thrust. Given its power, the Starship could lift up to 250 tons and accommodate 100 people on a trip to Mars, which could democratize space.
Elos Musk has already said that the goal is to make Starship reusable and reduce the price of space travel to a few million dollars per flight. “In the long term we should achieve full and rapid reusability,” he announced a few months ago.
The ultimate goal is to establish bases on the Moon and Mars and put humans on the “path to being a multi-planetary civilization,” Elon Musk said at the time, very confident that he could achieve this in a few decades.
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