A launch vehicle developed by the SpaceX company for flights of a new generation of ships caught fire during ground tests taking place in Texas. It is likely that because of this, the launch of the Starship ship into orbit, planned by the company’s founder Elon Musk (Elon Musk) this year, will have to be postponed.
‘Yes, not really good. The team is assessing the damage,’ Musk said on Twitter after the failed test of the Super Heavy Booster 7 prototype. Fortunately, no casualties were reported.
It is not known what caused the explosion, as a result of which the base of the rocket literally turned into a ball of fire with clouds of thick smoke. However, at the same time, the accelerator remained fixed on the test site. The incident occurred during a static fire test at a site in Texas. The accelerator, equipped with 33 Raptor engines, was to be used in an unmanned test flight planned by SpaceX for the second half of this year.
The entire 120 m high Starship is a ship with a superheavy accelerator – it is the company’s new space transport, designed in the future to make space travel cheaper and more common. No comments have yet been received from SpaceX and NASA.
In late 2020 and early 2021, SpaceX lost four Starship prototypes during a series of high-altitude test launches in which soft-landing attempts ended in explosions. Ultimately, the Starship prototype managed to land successfully in May 2021.
