The second launch attempt window for Starship started at 8:28 am central, April 20, 2023 after the Starship orbital launch mission had previously faced a scrub on April 17, 2023, owing to a pressurant wall malfunction. This time however, Starship was able to take off from the launchpad at Starbase, Boca Chica, Texas, United States.
Launch took place at 08:33 am Central US time. Just around three minutes mark in to the flight the Starship spacecraft had to be separated from the Super Heavy Booster. However, not only the starship was not able to separate from the booster, it gone into a out of control spinning motion. Soon after, at around four minutes mark into the flight, both the Starship along with its booster, exploded into the flames. The explosion was referred as Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (RAD) in technical terms on SpaceX’s livestream on youtube.
The Starship explosion was met with loud cheer from the SpaceX employees, who had gathered to see the launch. However, the SpaceX launch control room seemed to remain quite. Elon Musk, the owner and founder of SpaceX, was also present in the control room, he also remained quite and calm.
Elon Musk later also tweeted about the event, he congratulated the SpaceX team regarding the launch and also mentioned that the flight in fact resulted in collection of lots of valuable data. The exact tweet from Elon Musk was as follows.
SpaceX’s official twitter account shared a video which shown beautiful liftoff scene of Starship, the tweet is as follows.
They also shared some exciting pictures of Starship during the first orbital launch attempt in another tweet, the tweet is as follows.
The explosion and associated fireworks can be seen in the following tweeted video.
As the whole Starship Orbital Test flight was streamed live on SpaceX’s official youtube channel. The video is still present on the channel under live streams. We have embedded it below, you can watch if you are interested in watching whole event.
Starship holds a key role in the SpaceX’s plans and Elon Musk’s vision to make the humans a multiplanetary species. According to Elon Musk occupying just earth, are very vulnerable and can be met with a similar fate of extinction which dinosaurs had faced after a giant asteroid hit the planet earth.
As a first step in making humans multiplanetary species, Elon Musk wants to put humans on Mars as soon as possible. SpaceX’s Starship will have key role in transporting the people and supplies to Mars. SpaceX is also collaborating with NASA, as part of Artemis program, where NASA wants to establish a permanent human presence on moon. In NASA’s Artemis program as well, the SpaceX’s starship will have a key role.
Today’s failure to reach orbit is only part of long term iterative process to perfect the fully integrated Starship rocket system. Earlier, SpaceX have perfected falcon 9 and falcon heavy rocket systems using similar iterative launches. Each flight, whether failed or successful, is source of lots of valuable flight data for SpaceX which is then used to improve things for upcoming flights of same rocket system or even upcoming rockets using similar engines or technologies.
SpaceX plans to fly its fully integrated Starship again in few months for the same orbital flight test. Also by the end of year 2023, SpaceX is hoping to have 80% chance of successful orbital test flight of fully integrated Starship rocket. Fully integrated Starship is the most powerful rocket which even flown yet in the world’s history of space flight.
Coming back to Starship’s first Orbital test flight, previously the fully integrated Starship was scheduled to flight on April 17, 2023, similar time in the morning. However, a pressurant valve malfunction had caused the mission mission scrub. Soon after, SpaceX had announced the details of today’s launch opportunity. However, fortunately today we have at least seen the on time launch, just after the start of predetermined launch time window.