Elon Musk’s space expedition suffers setback as rocket explodes

The plan by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, to embark on a space expedition this year has suffered a setback after his SpaceX rocket burst into flames during a test phase in the United States on Monday.

In a video posted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Spaceflight, the explosion occurred in SpaceX’s Starship Super Heavy Booster 7 prototype.

However, there was no report of injuries to the crew testing the next-generation spacecraft.

Musk, who confirmed the incident on his Twitter page on Tuesday, said that testing of all 33 engines spin at once contributed to the explosion.

He said the explosion during the ground test in Texas was not good, and the SpaceX team was looking into the situation.

READ ALSO: Elon Musk to take people to space with Starship, sets timeframe

The billionaire said: “Yeah, actually not good. The team is assessing the damage. Going forward, we won’t do a spin start test with all 33 engines at once.”

The explosion occurred four days after Musk terminated his Twitter acquisition deal following a disagreement over the percentage of bot accounts in the monetised daily active users (mDAUs) on the social media platform.

The Tesla founder’s decision to pull out of the $44 billion deal has resulted in a court case with the Twitter board hiring a law firm in a bid to compel him to complete the takeover.

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