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Elon's Mars Monster's Maiden Boom - World's Most Powerful Rocket Makes Explosive Debut
The first flight of the Elon Musk-owned SpaceX's Starship rocket ended in an explosion a few minutes after it successfully blasted off its launchpad in Texas, yesterday.
SpaceX's new Starship is the most powerful rocket that humanity has ever sent to space. While some may consider the explosive end a sign of total failure, others consider the 'rapid unscheduled disassembly' of Starship a very successful failure for the American rocket firm.
The fact that Starship made it off its launch pad is a reason to celebrate for Musk's SpaceX which plans to use the massive rocket to make humanity a multi-planetary species.
So what exactly happened that resulted in SpaceX blowing Starship up? Well to answer that question we need to explore the launch and its milestones in detail.
Yesterday's launch marked the first time the Starship module was staked atop the firm's Superheavy rocket. The combined Starship rocket measures 120 metres tall with a diameter of 9 metres.
The massive Starship stands taller than the Saturn V that took humanity to the moon. And while it may just stand a few metres taller than the Saturn V, the Starship rocket produces twice the amount of thrust of the moon rocket.
So, let's get back to yesterday's launch. The Starship's Super Heavy lower section fired up its 33 Raptor rockets and blasted the Starship off its launch pad in Boca Chica (yes, that's a real name), Texas.
The 'Super Heavy' first stage propelled the Starship off the launch pad. The rocket continued through max Q, the moment a rocket encounters the most stress from acceleration and air resistance as it pushes upward towards space.
However, the Starship was having quite a few problems at this point. SpaceX stated that some of the Raptor rockets from the first stage had stopped working before the point in the launch the Starship was supposed to detach from the 'Super Heavy'.
More problems then popped up as the Starship spacecraft failed to separate from the Super Heavy first stage, which was supposed to return to Earth. This caused the massive Starship rocket setup to start tumbling end over end.
With the massive rocket, which carries nearly 5 million litres of heavily flammable fuel (a potent mix of supercooled methane and liquid oxygen), tumbling out of control over the Gulf of Mexico, the SpaceX team decided that it was time to hit the kill switch.
Like every modern-day rocket system, Starship has a built-in self-destruct system for situations like the one seen yesterday and SpaceX's engineers triggered it causing the big boom over the sea that ended the rocket's maiden journey.
Thoughts About Starship's Maiden Boom
Elon Musk's Mars Dreaming Starship rocket made an explosive debut yesterday. However, the fact that it was able to get off the launch pad was a cause for celebration.
Musk plans to put another Starship on a launchpad soon, and knowing the maverick genius, we expect a Starship spacecraft to go into orbit by the end of this year.
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