NEW YORK (CNN Business) – A giant experimental missile built by SpaceX Elon Musk rose to an altitude of eight miles above the company’s test facilities in southern Texas, Wednesday, and returned as planned, before crashing into the ground in the midst of colossal plumes of flame and smoke. .
And there was no one on board the huge missile. It was an early evolutionary model for the Starship, a 160-foot-high spacecraft that Musk has put forward that he hopes will be used to ferry massive satellites into Earth’s orbit, move people between cities at breakneck speeds, and, ultimately, create a human settlement on Mars.
The test flight was the highest test flight yet of the technology that Musk hopes will someday transport the first humans to go to Mars, and the fiery ending was not entirely unexpected.
Musk tried to lower expectations before the flight, saying in one tweet that he had predicted that the “SN8” missile, the prototype name for the Starship used on Wednesday, had a chance of one in three to land safely on Earth.
SN8 managed to maneuver to return to its landing target, but Musk said on Twitter that a problem with the missile’s fuel system had caused it to land in such a way that it crashed.
Flames engulfed the landing site, outside the small coastal town of Boca Chica, Texas.
SpaceX and Mask were known to accept unfortunate accidents during the early stages of developing new spaceflight technology.
The company’s ethos is to move quickly and learn from mistakes, rather than following NASA-esque’s approach of slowly conducting thorough research and ground tests before placing a missile on the launch pad.
Several earlier prototypes of the spacecraft were destroyed during pressure tests, which were designed to check whether the vehicle was able to withstand the tremendous pressure it is subjected to during refueling and while in flight.
It had previously tried twice this week to launch a test flight, but both first attempts were interrupted with only moments remaining on the countdown clock.
