Moments after what was considered to be a beautiful landing, SpaceX’s rocket Starship exploded into smithereens, after what had supposedly been a perfect flight. Just as a SpaceX commentator said “A beautiful soft landing,” on the live broadcast of the test flight, although flames were coming out at the bottom and crews were trying to put them out, it exploded a moment later.
This was the third such landing attempt to end in a fireball after an otherwise successful test flight for the Starship, being developed by SpaceX to carry humans and 100 tons of cargo on future missions to the moon and Mars. This rocket had been aimed at gathering data about how well the flaps worked while the Starship was horizontal. It is to be noted that the previous two trials (SN8 and SN9) had also crashed on landing, in December and then in early February.
Meanwhile, the company’s eccentric genius founder Elon Musk had a rather different reaction to this event. In a tweet responding to tempered congratulations from an admirer of his work, Musk replied, “RIP SN10, honorable discharge.”
The Starship rocket, which is about 394-feet (120 metres) tall along with its super-heavy first-stage booster, is SpaceX’s next-generation fully reusable launch vehicle. This is the centre of Musk’s ambitions to make human space travel more affordable and routine.
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