At the three-minute mark commentators indicated an issue with the test flight.
Billionaire Elon Musk's iconic rocket Starship, the largest and most powerful ever built designed to send astronauts to the Moon and Mars and beyond, exploded on Thursday during the spacecraft's first test flight. Mr Musk said that the next Starship test will be in a few months.
Minutes after SpaceX congratulated itself on an "exciting first integrated flight test of Starship", the company tweeted that the rocket "experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation".
At the three-minute mark commentators indicated an issue with the test flight. The rocket began to flip for the separation stage and the rotating rocket could be seen in the SpaceX livestream.
Starship should have separated from the super-heavy booster but the rocket continues to rotate, the commentators said. "This does not appear to be a nominal situation," the commentator stated after which the rocket exploded in the sky.
The gigantic rocket successfully blasted off at 8:33 am Central Time (1333 GMT) from Starbase, the private SpaceX spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas. The Starship capsule 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.
The SpaceX Starship lifts off from the launchpad during a flight test from Starbase
The SpaceX Starship explodes after launch for a flight test from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas
Despite the failure to complete the full flight test, SpaceX declared it a success. "We cleared the tower which was our only hope," said Kate Tice, a SpaceX quality systems engineer.
"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," SpaceX tweeted. "Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on an exciting first integrated flight test of Starship!"
After a failed first attempt on Monday, where liftoff of the giant rocket was called off just minutes ahead of the scheduled launch time because of a pressurization issue in the booster stage, there was great excitement for this launch.
Elon Musk had been hesitant about the launch. The SpaceX owner had warned ahead of the launch that technical issues were likely and sought to play down expectations for the inaugural test flight.
"It's a very risky flight," he said. "It's the first launch of a very complicated, gigantic rocket. There's a million ways this rocket could fail," Musk said.
The US space agency 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 program ended in 1972.
SpaceX foresees eventually putting a Starship into orbit, and then refueling 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 civilization," 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."
(With inputs from AFP)
