During the tests of the first stage of the superheavy Starship rocket, an explosion occurred under its engine block. The rocket did not collapse, but the launch pad, apparently, received minor damage, so the tests were stopped.
Starship is a superheavy rocket that SpaceX has been developing for several years. It will be two-stage and fully reusable: both stages will be able to return to the spaceport or land on a marine platform like the first stage of the Falcon 9. The Starship will use Raptor 2 methane-oxygen liquid rocket engines. 33 such engines will be used in the first stage, and six in the second, half of which will be optimized for vacuum operation.
Over the years, SpaceX has moved noticeably closer to the first flight of Starship and conducted a series of test flights of second-stage prototypes. In the summer of 2019, a scaled-down prototype called Starhopper took off 20 meters for the first time, and two years later, after a series of partially successful flights, the prototype Starship took off 10 kilometers for the first time, landed and did not explode after that.
After that, atmospheric flight tests stopped and the company began to prepare for the first flight into orbit. To do this, it has built several full-fledged rocket prototypes and built a maintenance tower that will also catch the second stage during landing, and this may happen already during the first orbital flight, follows from a recent update of the test plan, which SpaceX handed over to the FCC.
This first stage of the Starship, known as Booster 7, had already encountered problems during tests in the spring, but at the end of June SpaceX resumed them. During the last stage of the tests, which took place on the night of July 11-12, SpaceX simulated preparation for launch, in which the turbopumps in the engine are unwound, but there is no ignition. However, the tests ended in an explosion. In the video from the tests, you can see that gas was coming out of the engine block, and then the gas output accelerated many times and an explosion occurred.
The damage could be seen both during the explosion and after, when a fire started on the launch pad, which was later extinguished. After the tests, Elon Musk said on Twitter that the explosion occurred during the testing of turbopumps, and that in the future the company will not launch units of all 33 engines at once.
In addition to the technical difficulties before the orbital launch of SpaceX, it is necessary to solve the legal ones. In particular, the company has been waiting for about a year for the results of the environmental assessment of its spaceport in Texas, and in mid-June received a response from the regulator. He allowed the company to conduct orbital launches, but only after several dozen actions aimed at reducing the impact of the cosmodrome on the environment have been carried out.
Grigory Kopiev