SpaceX Starship blows up after launch

SpaceX's Starship - the most powerful space rocket ever built - has blown up shortly after its launch in Texas. SpaceX is owned by one of the world’s richest men, Elon Musk, and he has said that his team would try again in the coming months. But does the latest setback leave his space ambitions in tatters? With the analysis is the science journalist, author and BBC presenter, Richard Hollingham.

Richard - It blew up. But before that, it was, I would say, a successful launch. So this enormous rocket, 120 metres tall, all 33 engines fired. It dragged itself off the launch pad and all seemed to be going well until about three minutes into the mission. And this is a massive rocket, at which point, the two parts of it, the upper stage, which has these little wings on the top, looks like a proper, proper starship, failed to separate from the lower stage. And then around four minutes into the flight, it blew up. Now it probably blew up automatically with an automatic system or engineers triggered it to blow up because by that time, the mission was, was failing. Also, by that time, partway into the mission, not all 33 engines were firing. So 27 of the 33 were firing. But nevertheless, it's an extraordinary engineering achievement to get something like this off the ground at all. And they absolutely considered it a success. And I love the engineering speak phrase they used for the explosion. They called it rapid, unscheduled disassembly.

Chris - <laugh>. It's like when someone falls from a great height and says they suffered deceleration injury. But no one was hurt in this, were they? I mean, this was unmanned.

Richard - No one was hurt. No people on board. I mean, that was one of the great achievements because I mean they'd not been building this up. Elon had been very much managing expectations in his tweets over the last few weeks about this launch. It'd already been postponed. It looked like it was almost going to be postponed again. One of the big fears was it would blow up on the launchpad and then you are back, years probably, to just have to rebuild the launch pad and that whole ground infrastructure around it. But the fact that it got off the ground, it reached 39 kilometres above the Earth, there was a round of applause in mission control. So they're very much considering this a success and the next step will be another attempted launch of another Starship. They’ve got several waiting in a few months time once they've figured out exactly what went wrong.

Chris - And just briefly, Richard, why do they need this rocket? What's it going to do? What's the ambition for it?

Richard - Well, the initial ambition is to make money. So, Elon Musk wants to launch an awful lot of satellites. It can launch 150 tonnes worth of satellites into orbit. More long term, he wants to carry people, and this can carry up to a hundred people. NASA has contracted SpaceX to use Starship to land its astronauts on the moon as part of its Artemis program. So it's needed in the next few years, at least. The upper stage is needed for that. And ultimately, Elon Musk wants to set up settlements on Mars. So starships are destined to carry people to Mars ultimately.