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SpaceX prototype rocket lands aflame in Texas

Thu 10 Dec 2020    
| < 1 min read

A SpaceX prototype of the company’s future ‘Mars missions go-to’ rocket touched down in a fiery explosion Wednesday during a test launch from Boca Chica, Texas.

The live footage showed the 16-story-tall unmanned Starship vessel engulfed in flames, as it made its controlled descent on the landing pad. The rocket is currently being developed for heavy-lift take-offs by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s private space company. It intends to accommodate both humans and 100 tons of cargo on future missions to the moon and Mars.

The test flight had set out to reach an altitude of 41,000 feet, propelled by three of SpaceX’s newly developed Raptor engines for the first time. But the company left unclear whether the rocket had flown that high.

Musk immediately responded with a tweet following the mishap:

SpaceX made its first attempt to launch Starship on Tuesday, but a problem with its Raptor engines forced an automatic abort just one second before liftoff.

The complete Starship rocket, which will stand 394-feet (120.09 meters) tall in its final evolution, is the company’s next-generation fully reusable launch vehicle. It will mark an era of affordable and routine human space travel, as per Musk and NASA, who aim to hike the frequency of US space missions without reliance on foreign vessels.

NASA awarded SpaceX $135 million to help develop Starship, alongside competing vehicles from rival ventures Blue Origin, the space company owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, and Leidos-owned Dynetcis.

The three companies are vying for future contracts to build the moon landers under NASA’s Artemis program, which calls for a series of human lunar explorations within the next decade.

[Sourced from Agencies]