The takeoff of Starship had been postponed to this Thursday, 20 April at 13:28 UTC. The largest rocket in the world, developed by Space X, rose from the Starbase space base in the United States before exploding in midair.
The largest rocket in the world, Starship, developed by SpaceX, took off from the Starbase space base, in the far south of Texas, United States, this Thursday, 20 April 2023 but it then exploded in full flight. No one was on board.
Three minutes after Starship lifted off, the rocket’s first stage, called Super Heavy, was expected to detach and fall back into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The Starship spacecraft then had to turn on its six engines and continue its ascent on its own, up to an altitude of approximately 150 km. After having made a little less than a turn of the Earth for about an hour, it was to fall back into the Pacific Ocean.
Monday, 17 April, takeoff had to be postponed due to a problem of pressurisation at the level of the tanks of the first stage of the rocket, constraining SpaceX to postpone takeoff at the last minute.
Starship measures 120 m and is capable of carrying more than 100 tonnes of cargo into orbit. It had never flown in its full configuration before. Its ambition is to return humans to the Moon, but also to send them to Mars.
NASA, the American space agency, chose this spacecraft to land its astronauts on the Moon during the Artemis 3 mission, officially scheduled for 2025.