SpaceX’s spaceship called Starship, designed to take astronauts to the moon and beyond, seemed to have a problem in space shortly after it took off on Saturday. This was the second try, and the first one ended in an explosion.
“The two-part rocketship launched from Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, at the Starbase launch site in Texas. It went up about 55 miles, planning to be in space for around 90 minutes.
However, the first part of the rocket, called Super Heavy, looked like it did the right move to separate from the core stage, but unfortunately, it exploded over the Gulf of Mexico right after it disconnected.
SpaceX tried launching its Starship rocket again, but it didn’t go well. The big booster part exploded, and they lost contact with the other part about 10 minutes later. This was the second attempt after the first one in April also failed.
The plan was to send Starship up and then have it come back down off the coast of Hawaii. Elon Musk, the SpaceX boss, wants Starship to do a lot of space missions, including going back to the moon and eventually to Mars.
NASA, the space agency, is counting on Starship for its own space program called Artemis, which aims to send humans to the moon again. The launch was supposed to happen on Friday but got delayed by a day.
In the April test, things went wrong from the start, and the rocket blew up in less than four minutes. SpaceX said some of the engines didn’t work right, and the parts of the rocket didn’t separate like they were supposed to. This information is from France 24.