The largest Starship rocket ever flew in the Earth's sky, bypassing the atmosphere for about an hour before it lost contact and exploded (Reuters)

SpaceX, the American company owned by Elon Musk, achieved promising success by launching its huge rocket, “Starship,” outside the Earth’s atmosphere for the first time, amid great public celebration. This rocket is scheduled to be responsible for carrying humans to the surface of Mars in the future.

The Starship missile is the largest and heaviest missile ever.

Its total length is about 122 meters, and it weighs 5,000 tons.

The rocket took off from SpaceX's launch pad located south of Texas in America at 4:25 p.m. Mecca time on Thursday, March 14.

The space flight lasted about 49 minutes, and the missile reached record levels at an altitude of 200 kilometers above sea level, but the Starship did not survive upon its return to the Earth’s atmosphere, shattering due to its explosion over the Indian Ocean, and no official body has yet announced any injuries or injuries. losses.

SpaceX officials commented that this space mission achieved many basic and important goals, and it is the third test mission for the huge Starship rocket. This test mission is called the “Integrated Flight Test” (IFT), which is an experiment with both parts integrated together that make up the rocket. They are the upper part, which is the spacecraft that will carry astronauts in the future, and the lower part, which is the booster, which contains the propulsion system to guide the missile.

Both experimental missions had previously failed by exploding before completing the required tasks last year, while the engineers were able to recover much of the essential technical data related to the operation of the 33 engines, and the results helped them make the third experimental mission a success.

Engineers are expected to similarly work on the data generated by this mission to develop the ideal use case for Starship in the future.

The Starship rocket was designed to be completely reusable, just as is the case with the

Falcon 9

rockets , which have become a milestone in the space industries today.

The day of the missile launch yesterday, March 14, also coincided with two important occasions:

Pi Day, as well as the founding day of SpaceX 22 years ago.

The company's founder, Elon Musk, congratulated his crew on this achievement and commented in a brief post on the X platform, saying: With a weight of approximately 5,000 tons, Starship is the largest flying object ever made by man.

At ~5000 tons, Starship is the largest flying object ever made https://t.co/r5kzjpbD9B

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 14, 2024

Given that humans are close to returning to the moon's surface within two years, there is an urgent need to accelerate the readiness of Starship, which will participate in NASA's Artemis mission in 2026.

Source: websites