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SpaceX attempted to launch and fly its Starhopper rocket prototype into the south Texas skies on Wednesday, but an unexplained problem has halted the flight test.
Starhopper measures over 60 feet tall and 30 feet wide, has three landing feet and is made of stainless steel. The vehicle is not designed to fly in space, however; it's a benchmark for technologies that could potentially fuel a much larger and more powerful launch system called Starship.
Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, envisions Starship as a fully reusable system of nearly 400 feet that can carry about 100 people and more than 100 tons of cargo at a time to Mars. Where Starhopper has a Raptor rocket engine, a large-scale spacecraft destined for deep space could use more than 40, according to Musk.
Musk tweeted Last week, Starhopper was supposed to take off, fly over, cross and land during this test. If successful, it would be the most ambitious test to date for the vehicle, which workers have chained to its launching pad at the very first launches in early April.
However, the test did not take place, as SpaceX hoped on Wednesday night, as revealed by a YouTube program of the company.
"As you can see, the vehicle did not take off"
The video above shows about 20 seconds of the Starhopper launch attempt.
The rocket fired its only engine just after 20:32. ET (19:32 GMT) blowing a cloud of exhaust gas with rockets, steam and dust. But two or three seconds later, SpaceX engineers or automated systems shut down the engine and ended the flight.
"It seems like we had a failure in testing today," said Kate Tice, certification engineer at SpaceX, during the show. "As you can see there, the vehicle did not take off."
A few seconds after stopping the engine, a ventilation hole on the top of the vehicle ignited and started to ignite, although it did not appear to have caused visible damage and quickly extinguished.
The aborted launch follows a successful test drive last week, although this test apparently disconnected a fuel line, spilled liquid methane on the launch pad and triggered a huge outbreak.
Read more: A huge fireball briefly swallowed Mars' SpaceX rocket prototype, but Elon Musk said there was "no major damage"
Tice reminded viewers during Wednesday's launch attempt that Starhopper was part of an ongoing development program and not an operational rocket system.
"Today was a test flight designed to test the limits of the vehicle," said Tice.
A SpaceX spokesperson had previously told Business Insider in an email that the rollover test was one of a series of tests designed to push the limits of the vehicle as fast as possible to learn. everything we could, and safely. . "
A representative of the company is not able to provide immediate additional information about the launch abortion, its cause or when SpaceX will make its next attempt.
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