SpaceX Starship Explodes After Liftoff From Texas

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S​paceX's massive Starship rocket hurtled toward space Thursday morning, but fell short in a spectacular explosion about four minutes after liftoff.

The company counts that as a win.

"As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation," SpaceX tweeted.

T​here were no people or cargo onboard.

"We want to remind everyone that anything is a success today," an announcer on the launch live stream noted shortly before the launch. "​If we lift off and clear the pad, we're calling that a win."

The rocket took off from SpaceX's Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas, after a brief delay with 40 seconds left on the countdown clock.

Today's launch came after a first try was scrubbed Monday.

"Learned a lot today ... retrying in a few days," SpaceX founder Elon Musk tweeted after the launch was called off.

Earlier, Musk had tweeted that a pressure valve on the rocket appeared to be frozen.

The liftoff was canceled with less than 9 minutes on the countdown clock, but SpaceX ran the launch sequence down to T minus 40 seconds as a rehearsal.

Here are some key things to know about Starship:

It was built to carry people to the moon and Mars and even beyond, but the first flight is only slated to last about 90 minutes. The engines are powered by methane, considered to be key to deep space flight.

The rocket is made up of the Starship launch vehicle on top of SpaceX's new Super Heavy booster. Starship's upper stage has gone through several rounds of testing at Boca Chica included sub-orbital flight. Some of those experiments resulted in spectacular explosions at the base, located about 20 miles from Brownsville, Texas.

The launch vehicle and booster are reusable just like SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9, but there won't be any landing or recovery attempts with the first launch. On future launches, the booster is designed to return to its launch pad. SpaceX is also retrofitting one of its launchpads at Kennedy Space Center in Florida to accommodate Starships.

SpaceX has a $3-billion contract with NASA to land astronauts on the moon as early as 2025. The plan is to use a Starship vehicle as a lander, ferrying astronauts after they are launched into orbit as part of the Artemis program.

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J​an Childs covers space, climate change, news and feature stories for weather.com.

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