SpaceX Starship rocket blows up minutes after launch

The largest and most powerful rocket ever built blasted off from Texas but blew up within minutes, in a test flight that its makers, SpaceX, hope will be the first step on a human journey to Mars.

After a cancelled launch earlier this week due to a pressurisation issue, the 120-metre Starship rocket system took off at 8.33am local time on Thursday. It gathered speed but then started to spin at altitude before exploding about four minutes after leaving the ground. It appeared that the two sections of the rocket system – the booster and cruise vessel – were unable to separate properly after takeoff, possibly causing the spacecraft to fail.

The Guardian on YouTube:

#SpaceX #Space #Rocket #Science #News #UK

[giantpunda]

That's the biggest firework that I've ever seen! Elon must be so proud

[pauloakwood]

Just as she says, "everything after clearing the tower is icing on the cake." The whole thing blows up. This woman is an absolute jinx!

[bustavonnutz]

People here don't realize this is literally the first testlaunch of the full assembly. The first. Expectations were met the moment Starship successfully launched; it was meant to be expendable.

[michealbay]

Impressive! I shall incorporate this into my next transformers movie.
E: sorry Elon Musk

[dsofe]

Absolutely surreal watching this thing tear apart the concrete pad, hoist tself into the air and climb through maxQ all while periodically blowing up engines and scattering pieces of itself left and right. What a total juggernaut of a rocket.

[heinzie]

I got goosebumps when this monolith started rising off the ground. Very impressive first attempt. And the fact that it held together after 5 raptors flamed out on one side of the booster was also pretty impressive. The first of many.

[pietrobernasconi]

The Moonlanding 😂😂😂😂 What a wonderful Hollywood film

[AcmePotatoPackingPocatello]

I saw it from the beach of San Pedre Island. 5 miles away.

Huge skyscraper on flaming directed energy.
Powerful.
Unreal in size.
Extraordinary.

[JackPomi]

Well, we still must know that this thing is skyscraper-sized, packed with a technology to land back safely after being used (at least it is meant to be reusable), this technology is only several years old (first rocket stage landing was performed by SpaceX only in 2015).
It's still an achievment, i hope soon they will launch a successful full-packed Starship-Super Heavy rocket.

[markmartin]

There are always missions that don’t work out order to succeed. To watch the launches makes me proud, and that someone is actually trying, instead of the do nothing crowd, and is just full of can’t do negative talk!

[tomriddle]

It's still considered a successful test. This flight test has proven that their model is workable.

[isaiah]

Considering that out of the 204 total launches that SpaceX has done only six rockets have failed ( not counting the booster landings ) is pretty impressive.

[occamsrayzor]

The choice for this prototype a few months ago was to either scrap it or launch it to get valuable real-world flight data, and they chose the latter. Scrapping was considered since they already have 3 boosters at full height (and 5 more under construction), which have more mature designs and eliminated a lot of the known failure points that actually failed in this attempt, such as the hydraulic pressure unit that exploded seconds after liftoff & is speculated to have caused the loss of control. People also don't understand how insanely cheap this rocket is considering how much more capable it is vs. others in its class (around $4B for SLS vs. just around the ballpark of $100M for Starship).

[arekkasu]

Have you’ve ever heard of the Term “This ain’t Rocket Science” This is Rocket Science!
I’m From Texas have family working at SpaceX as we speak, we are revolutionizing Space Exploration once again.

[huntii]

Elon Musk looked around "what happened?" 😁

[aleph]

No worries. The Falcon rockets took a couple tries as well.

[paulliddle]

Successfully left the platform. Amazing job. What a fantastic thing to watch.

[LegioneSacra]

Great launch, i hope all the data will be helpfull

[AmirBrooks]

"Everything after clearing the tower was icing on the cake".

**Explodes**

[kokopelli]

Our Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly was a huge success!