SpaceX's Starship Launches Before Exploding 24 Miles Up

pcmag.com:

Space is hard, as people in the business like to say, and SpaceX delivered a dramatic demonstration of that when its massive Starship rocket(Opens in a new window) launched and then began tumbling out of control before exploding four minutes after liftoff.

“Starship just experienced what we called a rapid unscheduled disassembly,” launch commentator John Insprucker observed as bits of rocket shrapnel rained down from the upper atmosphere.

The uncrewed test flight began at 9:33 a.m. ET after a brief hold at T-40 seconds to address tank pressurization issues. Starship lifted off and slowly ascended from the pad SpaceX built at its Boca Chica, Texas, facility that it’s christened Starbase.

The livestream(Opens in a new window) of the launch showed(Opens in a new window) that six of Starship’s 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines were not lit, but Insprucker reported a nominal trajectory through the tricky period of maximum aerodynamic pressure (”Max Q”(Opens in a new window)) and almost all the way to first-stage shutdown.

But then Starship started tumbling end over end, first stage engines still lit. The rocket did not pull out of that spin and exploded about 24 miles up(Opens in a new window), either because aerodynamic forces broke it apart or because of a self-destruct command issued to ensure it would break up over open water.

SpaceX had been working toward this day since May 2021, when it successfully launched a Starship upper stage on a high-altitude test flight that ended with a vertical landing of the vehicle. 

The two-stage, fully reusable(Opens in a new window) Starship will represent a giant leap in capability for SpaceX and for human spaceflight in general. With a maximum of 16.7 million pounds of thrust in its