Now the rocket flew further than ever. The first two test flights lasted only a few minutes. Both ended with the rocket exploding.
The space company SpaceX’s Starship successfully took off towards space on Thursday afternoon Finnish time. It was launched from Texas near the Mexican border.
It was a Tesla billionaire Elon Musk’s the third test flight of the space rocket project. The rocket flew farther and faster than in previous attempts. It was scheduled to orbit halfway around the globe and then make a controlled descent into the Indian Ocean about 65 minutes after launch.
However, SpaceX announced that it lost contact with the rocket as it was re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere about 40 miles (65 km) above sea level.
The rocket managed to reach an amazing speed of 26,000 km/h and rose 200 kilometers above the earth’s surface. The rocket was in the air for about an hour.
The Starship’s previous test flight attempt in November ended with the explosion of the ship and the launch vehicle. The first attempt, on the other hand, ended in an intentional explosion in April of last year after, among other things, several engine failures had occurred during the test flight.
Although already the third test flight failed, the disappointment does not shine through in the messages sent by SpaceX to the public.
– It’s amazing to see how much further we got this time, the company representative commented.
Musk himself previously congratulated his company’s employees for “the long journey it has made with the rocket”.
Starship is quite a giant in size – the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. When standing on its launch pad, it has a length of no less than 121 meters. The thrust of the rocket is also huge, almost twice as powerful as the system previously used by NASA.
However, SpaceX’s rocket is still a prototype and thus still in the testing phase.
More than 3.5 million people watched the video stream of the exam.
SpaceX’s goal is to develop a rocket that could land NASA astronauts on the moon by the end of the decade. Musk himself has a goal that his rocket could one day take people to Mars.
SpaceX was founded exactly 22 years ago.
Sources: Reuters, AP, STT