Extraordinary fireball during tense landing of SpaceX test of Starship set to carry humans to the moon

The biggest and most powerful rocket in history has launched as Elon Musk’s SpaceX undergoes a critical test before humans return to the lunar surface.

Starship Flight 12 took off from the aerospace company’s launch pad in Starbase, Texas, on Friday night.

Although the vehicle successfully launched into space, the launch was not perfect because Starship lost the use of one of its six new ‘Raptor’ engines. It had to burn its remaining five engines longer to compensate.

According to SpaceX, this made a planned stress test of the spacecraft’s heat shield ‘spicy’; officials feared the capsule would not be able to pass through the planet’s atmosphere.

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Designed to carry people and cargo into space, the fully reusable, two-piece spacecraft has no crew and is entirely controlled remotely by SpaceX.

Flight 12 is testing the company’s latest design, the new Starship Version 3, which features several improvements based on lessons learned from previous test flights, including more efficient and powerful Raptor 3 engines, better fuel systems, and greater heat protection.

Musk and his team are eyeing this version of Starship, which NASA astronauts will use as a lunar lander for the Artemis program. It will carry astronauts to the lunar surface by 2028, when Artemis IV is scheduled to take off.

SpaceX’s long-term dream for Starship V3 is to send both humans and cargo to Mars to build the first self-sufficient city on the Red Planet. Starship is designed to be refueled in orbit so it can make the long journey to Mars.

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SpaceX Starship 12, the company’s third version of the vehicle, was successfully launched on May 22 at 6:30 pm ET.

SpaceX Starship 12, the company’s third version of the vehicle, was successfully launched on May 22 at 6:30 pm ET.

SpaceX Starship 12, the company’s third version of the vehicle, was successfully launched on May 22 at 6:30 pm ET.

Friday’s test flight is a suborbital mission, meaning it won’t enter full orbit, and was said by SpaceX to be a key first step in testing how the new Starship’s hardware behaves under real flight conditions.

Starship 12 had two important parts; ‘Super Heavy’, the lower booster stage with 33 powerful Raptor engines, and Starship, the upper stage above the booster with its own engines. It is the spacecraft that will carry astronauts into space.

Overall, the rocket stands as high as a 50-story building.

The test flight had several key objectives, beginning with a successful liftoff from Starbase, Texas, at 6:30 pm ET.

The Super Heavy booster departed after a few minutes of flight, performing a ‘rebound’ burn to slow itself down and then performing a landing burn to splash down slowly into the Gulf of America.

Unlike previous SpaceX missions, this rocket booster did not attempt to land back at the launch site as the company’s other reusable rockets have done.

Meanwhile, Starship’s upper portion continued into space, where it successfully deployed 22 dummy Starlink satellites 20 minutes into the flight.

Cameras inside the spacecraft captured the moment each communications panel slid out of the cargo hold and launched into orbit, with the SpaceX crew returning to Earth and chanting ‘USA’ from the company’s control center in Texas.

SpaceX noted during the flight that a planned restart of one of the spacecraft’s engines while in space was canceled due to the loss of one of Starship’s six engines during launch.

Starship 12 successfully reached space on May 22 despite the loss of one of its six engines

SpaceX spacecraft successfully launched 22 fake Starlink satellites (Pictured) during its tests in space

Flight 12 will then re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere at high speed and test the heat shields; One of the panels here was deliberately removed to see how the vehicle would withstand such stress.

The entire flight is planned to last approximately one hour.

Starship 12 was originally scheduled to launch on Thursday, but the mission was delayed after several attempts to fix a mechanical problem just 40 seconds after liftoff.

After the unsuccessful attempt, Musk announced that the hydraulic pin holding the tower arm in place did not retract from the vehicle.