Elon Musk suffered a humiliating failure as the latest test flight of SpaceX’s Starship rocket ended with it blowing up.
Musk hopes that the Starship rocket will one day be used to ferry people and cargo to Mars.
However, his dreams have been thrown into doubt with the latest failure, the third in a row for the SpaceX rocket.
The StarShip prototype blasted off from SpaceX’s launch site near Boca Chica, Texas just after 6.30pm local time on Tuesday.
It began spinning out of control around half an hour into its flight because of fuel leaks. The rocket suffered a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” up on re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, before slamming into the Gulf of Mexico.
In other words, it exploded into pieces.
The 403-foot (123-metre) rocket had managed to make it past the point where it blew up on previous tests in January and March, which Musk described as a “big improvement.”
But he admitted to reporters after the demo that he had “probably spent a bit too much time on politics.”
He continued: “It’s less time than people think (on politics), because the media is going to over-represent any political stuff, because political bones of contention get a lot of traction in the media.
“It’s not like I left the companies. It was a relative time allocation that probably was a little too high on the government side, and I’ve reduced that significantly in recent weeks.”
Last month, Musk he would be stepping away from some of his duties as Donald Trump’s ‘first buddy’ to focus on his businesses.
He’d therefore been hoping for some success with the latest SpaceX test. Following the failure, a planned speech in which Musk was due to provide an update on his space exploration hopes was delayed with no explanation, Sky News reports.
NASA are relying heavily on SpaceX to make significant developments in the next year as the space agency looks to get astronauts back on the moon.
NASA is aiming to do this by 2027 at the earliest and will need a Starship to get two astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface and back off again.
Next year, four astronauts will fly around the moon, but will not land.
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