SpaceX Rocket Explosion: Blast in SpaceX’s heaviest rocket, yet why are scientists happy, why are they calling it a success – why experts are feeling spacex rocket exlposion was not a failure
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most powerful rocket
Starship is the most powerful rocket ever developed and is designed to be fully reusable. It is composed of two distinct phases, or sections. The first stage, called the Super Heavy, is a collection of 33 separate engines and provides a velocity more than twice that of the Saturn V, the Saturn rocket that sent astronauts to the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s.
The first stage is designed to bring the rocket to about 40 miles (65 kilometers) above Earth. Once the super heavy is done, it has to separate from the rest of the structure and land safely back on the surface to be used again. At that point the second stage, dubbed the Starship spacecraft, has to ignite its own engines to carry the payload – whether it’s people, satellites or anything else – into orbit.
What if the launch was successful
An Explosive First Flight While parts of Starship have been tested before, the launch on April 20, 2023, was the first fully integrated test with the Starship spacecraft mounted on top of the Super Heavy rocket. If it had been successful, after passing the first stage, it would have separated from the upper stage and plunged into the Gulf of Mexico. After that the journey of the starship would have continued. During the SpaceX livestream, the team said that the primary goal of this mission was to lift the rocket off the launch pad. It accomplished that goal and did a whole lot more. Starship flew for more than three minutes at what engineers call “max Q”—the moment in which a rocket experiences the most pressure from acceleration and air resistance.
Many rocket blasts in testing
According to SpaceX, some things went wrong during the launch. First, shortly before the point at which the Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy rocket were to separate, several engine malfunctions occurred. The two stages also failed to separate at the predetermined time and the rocket started rolling from one end to the other as the two stages got stuck together. It is still unclear what specifically caused this failure. Starship was approximately 400 feet (120 m) long and weighed 11 million pounds (49 million kg).
An uncontrollable rocket filled with highly flammable fuel is a very dangerous object, so to prevent any damage, SpaceX engineers triggered the self-destruct mechanism and blew up the entire rocket over the Gulf of Mexico. All modern rockets have mechanisms that allow engineers to safely destroy the rocket in flight if necessary. SpaceX itself has flown many of its own rockets during testing.
SpaceX’s approach is completely different
Getting into space is hard, and it’s not at all unusual for new rockets to experience problems. In the past two years, both South Korea and Japan have attempted to launch new rockets that also failed to reach orbit. Commercial companies such as Virgin Orbit and Relativity Space have also suffered recent rocket failures. None of these were crewed missions, and in most of these failed launches, flight engineers intentionally destroyed the rockets after a problem arose.
SpaceX’s approach to testing differs from that of other groups. Its company philosophy is to fail fast, find problems and fix them with the next rocket. This differs from the more traditional approach adopted by organizations such as NASA, which spend more time identifying and planning for potential problems before attempting a launch. The traditional approach is slow.
Will help in the final goal
More than 10 years have passed in development for NASA’s Space Launch System — the rocket that will carry astronauts to the Moon as part of the Artemis program — before its first launch this past November. SpaceX’s method has helped the company grow very quickly, but it can be costly due to the time and resources it takes to build new rockets. SpaceX engineers will try to identify the specific cause of the problem so they can fix it for the next test launch. With this approach, the first such Starship test launches are successful failures that will help SpaceX reach its ultimate goal of sending astronauts to Mars.
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