Details of the explosion of Elon Musk’s space rocket have emerged: the self-destruct mechanism has worked

Failure befell Elon Musk’s ambitious plans to conquer space. His SpaceX spacecraft reached outer space for the first time, but exploded moments later – similar to the first flight in April.

SpaceX’s unmanned Starship, designed to carry astronauts to the Moon and beyond, made its first spacewalk on Saturday but is believed to have crashed minutes later.

According to The Guardian, this was Starship’s second test after its first attempt to send a ship into space ended in an explosion earlier this year.

The two-stage rocket ship blasted off from Elon Musk’s Starbase launch pad near Boca Chica, Texas, east of Brownsville, on a planned 90-minute uncrewed flight into space.

If successful, the rocket would splash down in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii. The company hopes the rocket will eventually be able to fly around Earth, which could take an hour and a half.

But about two and a half minutes into the flight, the spacecraft’s two stages separated from each other. SpaceX soon announced that it could not find a signal from the second stage, which it declared “lost.”

The company believes the missile’s self-destruct mechanism was activated after it lost its signal.

SpaceX’s second flight is considered an improvement over its first test launch in April, when both stages ultimately exploded four minutes into the flight. The first stage of the spacecraft, nicknamed the “super heavy” because of its 33 engines, failed, causing both stages to explode, The Guardian recalls.

This time, Super Heavy’s 33 engines managed to propel itself and its second stage, the Starship rocket system, into space. The Starship successfully separated from the Superheavy as planned, but the rocket’s automatic shutdown system activated, resulting in an explosion.

“What we do believe right now is that the automatic flight abort system on the second stage apparently kicked in very late as we were descending over the Gulf of Mexico,” SpaceX engineer John Insprucker said on the company’s broadcast.

The inspector did not specify what could activate the termination system.

On X, a social media platform also owned by Musk and formerly known as Twitter, SpaceX confirmed it had experienced an explosion, which the company calls a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”

“In testing like this, success is all about what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX strives to make life multiplanetary,” the company said.

The Federal Aviation Administration suspended the rocket’s launch pending safety and environmental reviews but cleared the launch this week. The company came under fire after its first launch due to the amount of debris it showered across Texas after its first explosion.

The company has a $4 billion contract with US space agency NASA, which hopes the partnership will lead to the first successful mission to the moon in more than five decades. Musk has broader aspirations for the company’s rockets, saying he wants to eventually send people to Mars on reusable rockets.

Musk has also floated the idea of ​​using the rocket for commercial travel, such as offering a one-hour flight from London to Tokyo.

Musk argued that the tests, even if they result in explosions, are important for the company to improve its spacecraft. A Nas spokesman recently suggested that the company would need to have its number of launches “at capacity” before the vehicle could be used for a lunar landing mission.