With a thunderous boom, the 33 engines of the Super Heavy booster of the most powerful rocket ever created lifted off from the launch pad.
“Starship has cleared the pad and beach! Vehicle is on a nominal flight path,” SpaceX tweets.
We should have had a separation by now, SpaceX engineers say.
The Starship test flight is now over, after experiencing what engineers have called a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” during ascent.
“To make it this far is amazing,” engineers say, after the rocket cleared its tower and successfully lifted off.
“You never know what’s going to happen,” they say, adding that “Starship gave us an exciting end to an incredible test”.
“As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation,” the company tweeted.
What a launch – seeing Starship head skywards, its 33 engines burning as it slowly pushed upwards into the blue Texan sky, was quite something. It passed a key point – clearing the tower and not blowing up the launch pad infrastructure.
So far so good.
But it was at the point where the booster tried to separate from the upper stage that things went wrong. The booster started tumbling, then boom – it was gone.
SpaceX call this a rapid unscheduled disassembly. But even though the company wanted this test to go further, they won’t call this a failure.
There were still cheers at SpaceX HQ even when the rocket went up in smoke. The fact that the rocket got off the ground is a start – they’ll assess what went right and what went wrong – and then have another go.