This morning at 9:34 am in Boca Chica, Southern Texas. SpaceX’s biggest, and most powerful rocket “The Starship” successfully launched and flew for four minutes before exploding. This test flight is expected to provide valuable data that the engineers sought as the first step back to the moon and humanity’s journey to Mars.
The rocket took off normally and passed through MaxQ (the point when an aerospace vehicle’s atmospheric flight reaches the maximum difference between the fluid dynamics total pressure and the ambient static pressure). As the first and second stages were approaching the point of separation, the rocket started to tumble and combusted completely. “Starship just experienced what we call a rapid, unscheduled disassembly,” said John Insprucker, SpaceX’s principal integration engineer. According to news reports and the live streamed video,  three of the of the ship’s 33 engines were not functioning properly.

Though the rocket fell in flames, SpaceX engineers and staff cheered as it slowly crashed down. To them, being able to lift up a 400-foot-tall off the ground was a huge step towards mankind’s future in space, and the future Mars/Moon expeditions. “With a test like this, success comes from what we learn,” SpaceX said in a tweet.

Some say that its engines were not powerful enough to withstand the huge rocket, which is why SpaceX is currently working on a new engine called Raptor. But it is yet to be reviewed due to multiple failures in earlier tests. SpaceX has lost from $2 billion to $10 billion worth of cash for the construction of the rocket to launch of the rocket being $10 million or less.