Elon Musk Will Not Spend Three Chances To Destroy The Starship Rocket

SpaceX tests the Starship SN10 rocket (Twitter @SpaceX)

JAKARTA - The prototype Starship rocket made by SpaceX successfully landed for the first time in a flight test. Unfortunately, a few minutes after landing the rocket that would take humans to Mars actually exploded.

It was SpaceX's third consecutive failure while testing the Starship rocket serial number SN-10. The trials were conducted in Boca Chica, Texas on Wednesday, March 3 at 18:14 local time.

"Three times just got lucky, as the saying goes. We managed to do a soft touchdown on the landing pad," said SpaceX technician John Insprucker as quoted by The Verge.

Even so in this trial, the Starship rocket managed to reach the targeted altitude of about 10 km from the surface. The rocket also managed to perform the 'belly flop' maneuver to change the rocket's position to vertical during the landing process.

The SN10 rocket managed to descend slowly and land smoothly, although there was a slight burning of flames coming out from the side. Unfortunately, a few minutes after landing the rocket as high as 45 meters exploded.

SN-10 Starship Rocket Blasts upon landing

Although it still ends in an explosion, the results of this trial are an astonishing achievement for SpaceX. The two previous trials, the SN8 and SN9 prototypes, failed to land and exploded because they failed to reduce speed.

"As a reminder, the important point of today's flight test is to collect data on vehicle control while reentering, and we successfully completed it," said John Insprucker.

On the other hand, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk remains optimistic that the Starship rocket can go into orbit by the end of this year, and start conducting manned flights in 2023. Even though two prototypes of the rocket exploded in spectacular fashion during their trials.

Starship SN10 landed in one piece! https://t.co/lO4AF47MaN

- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 4, 2021

Although the Starship SN-10 rocket exploded and left nothing but debris and puffs of smoke. SpaceX has already built several other Starship rocket prototypes, and the SN11 prototype is ready to be tested in the near future.

The estimated production cost of a Starship rocket prototype costs around US $ 216 million or Rp. 3 trillion. In comparison, the Falcon 9 rocket costs around US $ 54 million or the equivalent of Rp. 762 billion.

So far SpaceX has designed Starship as a reusable rocket. This 120 meter rocket is ready to carry astronaut crew and cargo weighing 100 tonnes for space missions.

This reusable rocket is Musk's ambition to make space flight affordable and routine. This rocket will also be used by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa to fly to the Moon with eight other selected people.