BOCA CHICA, Texas, April 20 (Reuters) - Elon Musk's SpaceX on Thursday successfully launched its next-generation Starship cruise vessel for the first time atop the company's powerful new Super Heavy rocket in an uncrewed test flight that ended minutes later with the vehicle exploding in the sky.
The two-stage rocketship, standing taller than the Statue of Liberty at 394 feet (120 m) high, blasted off from the company's Starbase spaceport and test facility east of Brownsville, Texas, for what SpaceX hoped, at best, would be a 90-minute debut flight into space.
A live SpaceX webcast of the lift-off showed the rocketship rising from the launch tower into the morning sky as the Super Heavy's raptor engines roared to life in a ball of flame and billowing clouds of exhaust and water vapor.
But less than four minutes into the flight, the upper-stage Starship failed to separate as designed from the lower-stage Super Heavy, and the combined vehicle was seen flipping end over end before exploding.
Nevertheless, SpaceX officials on the webcast cheered the feat of getting the fully integrated Starship and booster rocket off the ground for a clean launch and delared the brief episode a successful test flight.
Also Read: Starship From Elon Musk’s SpaceX Blows Up. That’s Not Bad News? —-Dow Jones
Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX launched its huge Starship Thursday. It blew up.
But it was still a success launch that could lead investors to being able to own a piece of the privately held aerospace giant sooner than they might expect.
Thursday was the second attempt for the company. A Monday launch was scrubbed due to a frozen valve in the lower stage of the launch system. The first launch attempt came just days after the Federal Aviation Administration issued it a vehicle operator license. The license is valid for five years.
“SpaceX does push the envelope, they try to tackle the difficult to impossible and do it in a reasonable timeline,” says Andrew Chanin, CEO of ProcureAM. The Procure Space ETF (UFO) offers investors easy access to several companies involved in space. There are about 38 stocks with space-related businesses in that ETF.
The live stream of the launch can be re-watched here. The stream went live at about 8:45 a.m. Eastern time.
Starship cleared the tower and hit about 1,000 kilometers per hour in about 90 seconds. Employees in Hawthorne, California, went, frankly, crazy. The test got hung up as the first stage was due to separate from the lower stage. The launch system exploded about four minutes in. SpaceX called it a “rapid, unscheduled, disassembly.”
No one at SpaceX seems disappointed. This was the first integrated test of Starship, with the upper and lower stages of the system together. SpaceX is used to blowing things up. Things rarely go as planned on the first try.
Starship is unique in a couple of ways. SpaceX pioneered the use of reusable rockets which drove down costs to reach space. Only the lower half of SpaceX rockets are currently reusable. That changes with Starship. Both the lower and upper half are designed to return to Earth and be reused.
Starship is also huge, standing almost 400 feet tall and designed to carry up to 100 to 150 metric tons to orbit. That is more than double the payload capacity of NASA’s new Space Launch System, or SLS.
It was thrilling with significant implications for the aerospace industry. “The bigger story here is …what this does for driving down the cost of accessing space,” added Chanin. Lower costs enables more businesses to develop cost effective space-based products.
That’s true for SpaceX too. Starship will accelerate SpaceX’s Starlink space-based Wi-Fi business. It will let the company put up many more satellites faster. Starship’s capacity is almost 10 times the capacity of a SpaceX Falcon rocket.
Musk has said might raise capital in an initial public offering of stock when Starlink’s cash flow is predictable. More satellites should speed the path to predictability.
SpaceX said Starlink had more than 1 million active subscribers at the end of 2022.
It was an exciting day for SpaceX, Musk and space enthusiasts. Investors interested in owing part of SpaceX has been rooting for a successful test.
Some publicly traded space stock might move depending on how the test goes. At this point, success for SpaceX is probably a positive for everyone. Rocket Lab USA (RKLB) is a little like a mini-SpaceX. It has launch capability and satellite building capabilities. It’s launch vehicles are smaller than SpaceX rockets.
Rocket Lab stock was down 2.3%. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite were both down 0.6%.