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BOCA CHICA, TEXAS - Elon Musk’s SpaceX on Thursday launched its next-generation Starship cruise vessel for the first time atop the company’s powerful new Super Heavy rocket, but the uncrewed test flight ended minutes later with the vehicle exploding in the sky. While the two-stage rocket ship failed to make it beyond an altitude of 32km, SpaceX officials cheered the outcome for achieving the test flight’s primary objective of getting the new spacecraft off the ground in what appeared to be an otherwise clean lift-off. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) chief Bill Nelson tweeted: “Congrats to @SpaceX on Starship’s first integrated flight test! Every great achievement throughout history has demanded some level of calculated risk, because with great risk, comes great reward. Looking forward to all that SpaceX learns, to the next flight test – and beyond.” The two-stage rocket ship, standing taller than the Statue of Liberty at 120m, blasted off from the company’s Starbase spaceport east of Brownsville, Texas, for what SpaceX hoped, at best, would be a 90-minute debut flight into space but just shy of Earth’s orbit. A live SpaceX webcast of the lift-off showed the rocket ship rising from the Gulf Coast launch tower into the morning sky over the southern tip of Texas as the Super Heavy’s Raptor engines roared to life in a ball of flames and billowing clouds of exhaust and water vapour. But less than four minutes into the flight, the upper-stage Starship failed to separate from the lower-stage Super Heavy as designed, and the combined vehicle was seen tumbling end over end before exploding. The spacecraft reached a peak altitude of nearly 32km before its fiery disintegration. A senior Federal Aviation Administration source said the spacecraft’s automated flight-termination appears likely to have been activated, triggering the rocket’s disintegration. Nevertheless, SpaceX officials on the webcast hailed the feat of getting the Starship and booster rocket off the launch pad for the first time, declaring the brief episode in that sense to be a successful test flight. A throng of SpaceX workers shown during the webcast, who were watching a live stream together at the company’s headquarters near Los Angeles, cheered wildly as the rocket cleared the launch tower, and again when it blew up in the sky. SpaceX principal integration engineer John Insprucker, serving as one of the webcast commenters, said the test flight would provide a wealth of important data, paving the way for the company to move ahead with additional tests. Mr Musk, founder, chief executive and chief engineer of SpaceX, said on Twitter that the next Starship test launch would be “in a few months”. “Congrats @SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship! Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months,” he tweeted. Mr Musk, who purchased Twitter in 2022 for US$44 billion (S$59 billion), is also CEO of electric carmaker Tesla. Beyond the launch itself, the test mission fell short of reaching several other objectives, such as deploying the Starship vessel into space and re-entering Earth’s atmosphere 97km off a Hawaiian coast at hypersonic speeds, where it would have faced key aerodynamic forces and blazing heat before plunging into the Pacific. Still, getting the newly combined Starship and booster rocket off the ground for the first time represented a key milestone in SpaceX’s ambition of sending astronauts back to the Moon and ultimately on to Mars, as a major partner in Nasa’s newly inaugurated human spaceflight programme, Artemis. REUTERS

<Elon Musk Frantically Warns Employees of Potential SpaceX Bankruptcy Musk advised employees to work over the weekend after reading Raptor engine production issues were far worse than previously thought. Image: Win McNamee (Getty Images) SpaceX employees received a nightmare email over the holiday weekend from CEO Elon Musk, warning them of a brewing crisis with its Raptor engine production that, if unsolved, could result in the company’s bankruptcy. The email, obtained by SpaceExplored, CNBC, and The Verge, urged employees to work over the weekend in a desperate attempt to increase production of the engine meant to power its next-generation Starship launch vehicle. “Unfortunately, the Raptor production crisis is much worse than it seemed a few weeks ago,” Musk reportedly wrote. “As we have dug into the issues following exiting prior senior management, they have unfortunately turned out to be far more severe than was reported. There is no way to sugarcoat this.” SpaceX did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment but Musk did Tweet about the report Tuesday afternoon. “The magnitude of the Starship program is not widely appreciated” Musk tweeted. “It is designed to extend life to Mars (and the moon), which requires ~1000 times more payload to orbit than all current Earth rockets combined.” Though Musk did not confirm or deny the email’s veracity he spoke to its content saying that, while he did not believe bankruptcy was likely, it wasn’t impossible either. The CEO went on to apparently quote Intel founder and former CEO Andrew Grove, writing “only the paranoid survive.” In his email, Musk advised workers to cut their holiday weekend short and called for an “all hands on deck to recover from what is, quite frankly, a disaster.” Summing up the problem, Musk warned the company could face bankruptcy if it could not get Starship flights running once every two weeks in 2022. If all of this sounds familiar, that’s because Musk has previously spoken publicly about times where both SpaceX and Tesla were on the verge of bankruptcy in their early years. More recently Musk claimed Tesla came within “single digits” of bankruptcy as recent as 2018. Raptor’s engine is a critical component of Starship, which SpaceX hopes will one-day transport cargo and people to the moon and Mars. Starship’s ability to meet these ambitious goals is critical to SpaceX’s long-term success which is built upon Elon Musk’s promise of multi-planetary human exploration. According to Musk’s email, Starship will also play a critical role in launching Starlink’s next-generation satellites into orbit. Musk’s stressed-out email follows a tweet earlier this month where the CEO admitted the Raptor 2 would need a “complete design overhaul” to make multi-planetary life possible. Not long after that, two SpaceX vice presidents abruptly left the company according to CNBC. One of those executives, Will Heltsley, who had been at the company since 2009, was working on the Raptor project but was taken off due to a lack of progress. The alarming news comes near the close of what’s been an otherwise stellar year for SpaceX. In 11 months SpaceX managed to launch 25 successful Falcon 9 missions, sent a dozen astronauts to space and drew a roadmap to mass commercialization with its Starlink satellite internet service. You can read the full email over at The Verge.>