STARSHIP, the most powerful rocket ever built, exploded during its first flight today, but Elon Musk congratulated his SpaceX team on an “exciting” test of the spacecraft designed to send astronauts to the Moon, Mars and beyond.

The uncrewed rocket disintegrated minutes after successfully blasting off at 8.33am Central Time from Starbase, the SpaceX spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas.

The Starship spacecraft that will eventually carry crew and cargo had been scheduled to separate from the first-stage rocket booster three minutes into the flight, but separation failed to occur and the rocket blew up in a ball of fire over the Gulf of Mexico.

Despite the failure to complete the full 90-minute flight test and reach orbit, SpaceX and Musk, the founder and CEO of the private space company, declared it a success.

“Congrats SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship!” Musk tweeted.

“Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months.”

SpaceX said that “with a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multi-planetary.”

“We cleared the tower which was our only hope,” Kate Tice, a SpaceX quality systems engineer, said.

Nasa has picked the Starship spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the Moon in late 2025 – a mission known as Artemis III – for the first time since the Apollo programme ended in 1972.

Starship consists of a 50m tall spacecraft designed to carry crew and cargo that sits atop a 70m tall first-stage super heavy booster rocket.

SpaceX conducted a successful test-firing of the 33 Raptor engines on the first-stage booster in February but the Starship spacecraft and the super heavy rocket have never flown together.

The integrated test flight is intended to assess their performance in combination.

Nasa will take astronauts to lunar orbit itself in November 2024 using its own heavy rocket called the space launch system (SLS), which has been in development for more than a decade.

Starship is both bigger and more powerful than SLS and capable of lifting a payload of more than 100 tonnes into orbit.

It generates 75.6 million Newtons of thrust, more than twice that of the Saturn V rockets used to send Apollo astronauts to the Moon.

The plan for the integrated test flight is for the super heavy booster to separate from Starship about three minutes after launch and splash down in the Gulf of Mexico.

Starship, which has six engines of its own, will continue to an altitude of nearly 240km, completing a near-circle of the Earth before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean about 90 minutes after launch.

However, they failed to separate, and the booster rocket and Starship spacecraft began spinning out of control, exploding four minutes into the test flight in what SpaceX euphemistically called a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”

“If we get far enough away from the launchpad before something goes wrong then I think I would consider that to be a success,” Musk said prior to the test. “Just don’t blow up the launchpad.”

SpaceX foresees eventually putting a Starship into orbit, and then refuelling it with another Starship so it can continue on a journey to Mars or beyond.

The eventual objective is to establish bases on the Moon and Mars and put humans on the “path to being a multi-planet civilisation,” according to Musk.

“We are at this brief moment in civilization where it is possible to become a multi-planet species,” he said. “That’s our goal. I think we’ve got a chance.” – AFP, April 20, 2023.