The 16-member body, formed last year among leading experts from scientific fields ranging from physics to astrobiology, held a four-hour session streamed live on a NASA webcast to deliberate their preliminary findings ahead of issuing a report expected later this summer.

The panel’s chairman, astrophysicist David Spergel, said his team’s role was “not to resolve the nature of these events,” but rather to give NASA a “roadmap” to guide future analysis.

NASA officials said several panelists had been subjected to unspecified “online abuse” and harassment since beginning their work in June last year.

“It is really disheartening to hear of the harassment that our panelists have faced online because they’re studying this topic,” NASA’s science chief, Nicola Fox, said in her opening remarks. “Harassment only leads to further stigmatization.”

The greatest challenge panel members cited, however, was a dearth of scientifically reliable methods for documenting UFOs, typically sightings of what appear as objects moving in ways that defy the bounds of known technologies and laws of nature.

The underlying problem, they said, is that the phenomena in question are generally being detected and recorded with cameras, sensors, and other equipment not designed or calibrated to accurately observe and measure such peculiarities.

“If I were to summarize in one line what I feel we’ve learned, it’s we need high-quality data,” Spergel said. “The current existing data and eyewitness reports alone are insufficient to provide conclusive evidence about the nature and origin of every UAP event.”

Taboos surrounding the issue also remain.

While the Pentagon in recent years has encouraged military aviators to document UAP events, many commercial pilots remain “very reluctant to report” them due to the lingering stigma surrounding such sightings, Spergel said.

The NASA advisory panel represents the first UFO inquiry ever conducted under the auspices of the US space agency for a subject the government once consigned to the exclusive and secretive purview of military and national security officials.

Pentagon-based investigation

The NASA study is separate from a newly formalized Pentagon-based investigation of sightings reported in recent years by military aviators and analyzed by US defense and intelligence officials.

The US military has documented more than 800 cases over the past two decades, said Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon’s newly formed All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO.

But just a few percent are considered beyond relatively simple explanation, while the rest can be attributed to mundane origins such as aircraft, balloons, debris or atmospheric causes, he said.

The parallel NASA and Pentagon efforts highlight a turning point for the government after decades spent deflecting, debunking, and discrediting reports of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, dating back to the 1940s.

But in finally addressing the issue head-on, both NASA and the Pentagon have emphasized the imperative of protecting US airspace, and by extension public safety and natural security.

In a departure from the Pentagon, NASA’s panel is examining only unclassified reports from civilian observers, an approach Spergel said permits open sharing of information among scientific, commercial and international entities, as well as the public.

The term UFOs, long widely associated with notions of flying saucers and aliens, has been replaced in official government parlance by the abbreviation UAP.

Recent US law revised the UAP acronym, previously confined to “aerial” phenomena, to stand for “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” expanding the NASA study team’s research scope to include puzzling events in space or at sea.

Panel members said the majority of their work still focused on aerial phenomena.

Moreover, both NASA and defense-intelligence officials have stressed that while the existence of intelligent alien life has not been ruled out, they have found no evidence suggesting an extraterrestrial origin for UFO sightings.

“To make the claim that we see something that is evidence of non-human intelligence would require extraordinary evidence, and we have not seen that,” Spergel said. – Rappler.com

I’m an astronomer who studies and has written about cosmology, black holes and exoplanets. Astronomers have been using AI for decades. In fact, in 1990, astronomers from the University of Arizona, where I am a professor, were among the first to use a type of AI called a neural network to study the shapes of galaxies.

Since then, AI has spread into every field of astronomy. As the technology has become more powerful, AI algorithms have begun helping astronomers tame massive data sets and discover new knowledge about the universe.

Better telescopes, more data

As long as astronomy has been a science, it has involved trying to make sense of the multitude of objects in the night sky. That was relatively simple when the only tools were the naked eye or a simple telescope, and all that could be seen were a few thousand stars and a handful of planets.

A hundred years ago, Edwin Hubble used newly built telescopes to show that the universe is filled with not just stars and clouds of gas, but countless galaxies. As telescopes have continued to improve, the sheer number of celestial objects humans can see and the amount of data astronomers need to sort through have both grown exponentially, too.

For example, the soon-to-be-completed Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile will make images so large that it would take 1,500 high-definition TV screens to view each one in its entirety. Over 10 years it is expected to generate 0.5 exabytes of data – about 50,000 times the amount of information held in all of the books contained within the Library of Congress.

There are 20 telescopes with mirrors larger than 20 feet (6 meters) in diameter. AI algorithms are the only way astronomers could ever hope to work through all of the data available to them today. There are a number of ways AI is proving useful in processing this data.

Picking out patterns

Astronomy often involves looking for needles in a haystack. About 99% of the pixels in an astronomical image contain background radiation, light from other sources or the blackness of space – only 1% have the subtle shapes of faint galaxies.

AI algorithms – in particular, neural networks that use many interconnected nodes and are able to learn to recognize patterns – are perfectly suited for picking out the patterns of galaxies. Astronomers began using neural networks to classify galaxies in the early 2010s. Now the algorithms are so effective that they can classify galaxies with an accuracy of 98%.

This story has been repeated in other areas of astronomy. Astronomers working on SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, use radio telescopes to look for signals from distant civilizations. Early on, radio astronomers scanned charts by eye to look for anomalies that couldn’t be explained. More recently, researchers harnessed 150,000 personal computers and 1.8 million citizen scientists to look for artificial radio signals. Now, researchers are using AI to sift through reams of data much more quickly and thoroughly than people can. This has allowed SETI efforts to cover more ground while also greatly reducing the number of false positive signals.

Another example is the search for exoplanets. Astronomers discovered most of the 5,300 known exoplanets by measuring a dip in the amount of light coming from a star when a planet passes in front of it. AI tools can now pick out the signs of an exoplanet with 96% accuracy.

Making new discoveries

AI has proved itself to be excellent at identifying known objects – like galaxies or exoplanets – that astronomers tell it to look for. But it is also quite powerful at finding objects or phenomena that are theorized but have not yet been discovered in the real world.

Teams have used this approach to detect new exoplanets, learn about the ancestral stars that led to the formation and growth of the Milky Way, and predict the signatures of new types of gravitational waves.

To do this, astronomers first use AI to convert theoretical models into observational signatures – including realistic levels of noise. They then use machine learning to sharpen the ability of AI to detect the predicted phenomena.

Finally, radio astronomers have also been using AI algorithms to sift through signals that don’t correspond to known phenomena. Recently a team from South Africa found a unique object that may be a remnant of the explosive merging of two supermassive black holes. If this proves to be true, the data will allow a new test of general relativity – Albert Einstein’s description of space-time.

Making predictions and plugging holes

As in many areas of life recently, generative AI and large language models like ChatGPT are also making waves in the astronomy world.

The team that created the first image of a black hole in 2019 used a generative AI to produce its new image. To do so, it first taught an AI how to recognize black holes by feeding it simulations of many kinds of black holes. Then, the team used the AI model it had built to fill in gaps in the massive amount of data collected by the radio telescopes on the black hole M87.

Using this simulated data, the team was able to create a new image that is two times sharper than the original and is fully consistent with the predictions of general relativity.

Astronomers are also turning to AI to help tame the complexity of modern research. A team from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics created a language model called astroBERT to read and organize 15 million scientific papers on astronomy. Another team, based at NASA, has even proposed using AI to prioritize astronomy projects, a process that astronomers engage in every 10 years.

As AI has progressed, it has become an essential tool for astronomers. As telescopes get better, as data sets get larger and as AIs continue to improve, it is likely that this technology will play a central role in future discoveries about the universe. – Rappler.com

This article originally appeared on The Conversation.

Chris Impey, University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy, University of Arizona

Scientists said on Wednesday, May 17, the planet, the third detected orbiting this particular star, is likely covered with volcanoes – similar to Jupiter’s moon Io, the most volcanically active body in our solar system. In our solar system, Earth and Venus are volcanically active, as are some of Jupiter’s moons.

The planet’s volcanism was not directly observed but rather inferred due to its significant gravitational interaction with the larger of the two other planets orbiting the dim star. The gravitational tug from the larger planet may squeeze and flex the newly identified one, heating up its interior and causing surface volcanic activity, similar to Io, the researchers said.

Planets beyond our solar system are called exoplanets.

“There is not yet any direct observational evidence of exoplanet volcanism, but this planet is a particularly likely candidate,” said University of Kansas astronomy professor Ian Crossfield, one of the authors of the research published in the journal Nature.

It is a planet that does not rotate – with one side perpetually in daylight and the other in darkness.

“On the dayside, it is too hot for liquid water, so it is likely very dry and hot – likely a desert. On the night side, there is possibly a large icy glacier,” said study co-author Björn Benneke, head of the astronomy group at the University of Montreal.

“The most interesting region is near the terminator region where the day and nightside meet. Here, water from the nightside glacier can melt and possibly form liquid surface water. In addition, there is likely volcanism all around the planet, even under the ice on the nightside and possibly under the water near the terminator,” Benneke said.

The planet is located in the Milky Way about 86 light-years away from our solar system in the direction of the constellation Crater. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

It is slightly larger than Earth and orbits very close to a red dwarf star – a type much smaller than our sun, with relatively low mass and temperature – completing its elliptical journey around it in only 2.8 days.

Its surface temperature appears to be slightly warmer than Earth. It is situated on the inner edge of what is called the habitable zone, or Goldilocks zone, around the star – not too hot and not too cold, perhaps able to maintain liquid water on the surface and harbor life.

“I imagine a rugged, young surface for the planet after many millions of years of constant volcanic activity. Since the gravitational effects don’t care about day and night side, I also suspect the volcanic activity to be evenly spread over the planetary surface,” said University of California, Riverside planetary astrophysicist and study co-author Stephen Kane.

“Since the planet is so volcanically active, it is still contributing gases to the atmosphere from the interior. As such, the planet probably still has an atmosphere. The planet is unlikely to be habitable, however, since the total amount of energy makes for a quite hostile environment. Who knows? Life may find a way,” Kane added.

Its orbit is sandwiched between the two other planets – the innermost one about 20% bigger than Earth and the outermost one about 250% the size of our planet.

The researchers spotted the planet using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope, as well as some ground-based observatories.

“There are still many unknowns regarding volcanism and how long a planet can maintain outgassing processes,” Kane said, referring to the release of trapped gas that occurs with eruptions. “We only recently confirmed that Venus, Earth’s twin planet, is volcanically active.” – Rappler.com

The P610-million Copernicus Capacity Support Action Programme for the Philippines (CopPhil), which was launched on Monday, April 24, will allow Filipino scientists to access the vast satellite data from EU.

With the Philippines as one of the countries most vulnerable to natural hazards and climate change, Department of Science and Technology Secretary Renato Solidum Jr. said the satellite data from the EU could help “strengthen the nation’s resilience to disasters and climate change.” 

“We want to make use of the data from EU Copernicus Observation satellites and ground-based data collection systems to support the Philippine government’s capacities for decision-making and monitoring of policy implementation based on timely and accurate data,” he said.

On average, 20 tropical cyclones hit the Philippines every year. The most disastrous of these have caused billions worth of damage to agriculture and have severely damaged communities.

Network of partners

Aside from helping in disaster response, the Philippine Space Agency said the satellite data from Copernicus will aid other government agencies in better decision-making. 

“We will bring this CopPhil programme and its output into the venue, not just to create awareness but traction across government agencies on the utilization of data and subsequently distributing this capacity not to be concentrated within PhilSA or the DOST but to be pervasive across the Philippine society,” PhilSA Director General Joel Marciano Jr. said. 

Prior to the launch of the program, Copernicus’ satellite images have already helped local authorities monitor calamities such as the aftermath of typhoon Odette and more recently the Oriental Mindoro oil spill.

The EU also shared its interest to expand partnerships with other countries in Southeast Asia.  

“In the long term the European Union is exploring the possibility to create a network of Copernicus partners in the ASEAN region aside from other parts of the world,” EU Ambassador to the Philippines Luc Véron said. 

Apart from data sharing, the three-year CopPhil program includes skills development and data infrastructure support. 

In 2021, Philippines and Japan inked an agreement to promote space cooperation between the two countries. – Rappler.com

American-Russian space cooperation was put in doubt after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Yuri Borisov, the director-general of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, surprised NASA by announcing in July 2022 that Moscow intended to withdraw from the space station partnership “after 2024.” A day later NASA said Roscosmos wanted to continue the partnership.

Nelson, who was in Ottawa to help showcase the Artemis II space mission including a Canadian astronaut, underscored the history of US and Soviet collaboration in space during the Cold War, and said he expects it to continue amid the war in Ukraine.

“We are completely at odds with President Putin’s aggression” that is “slaughtering people and invading an autonomous sovereign country,” Nelson told Reuters in an interview in Ottawa.

But the collaboration aboard the ISS “continues in a very professional manner between astronauts and cosmonauts without a hitch. And I expect that to continue all the way through the end of the decade, when they we will then de-orbit the space station.”

NASA has estimated it will begin de-orbiting the ISS in January 2031.

Launched in 1998, the ISS has been continuously occupied since November 2000 under a US-Russian-led partnership that also includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.

The space station was born in part from a foreign policy initiative to improve American-Russian relations following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Cold War hostility that spurred the original US-Soviet space race.

The ISS arrangement, which has endured numerous strains over the years, has stood as one of the last links of civil cooperation as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent relations between Washington and Moscow to a new post-Cold War low. – Rappler.com

The new image was obtained using 16 telescopes at various locations on Earth that essentially created a planet-sized observational dish. The supermassive black hole pictured resides at the center of a relatively nearby galaxy called Messier 87, or M87, about 54 million light-years from Earth.

A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

This black hole, with a mass 6.5 billion times that of our sun, was the subject of the first image of such an object ever obtained, released in 2019, with another black hole pictured last year.

Those images, which showed just the darkness of the black hole and a ring of bright material plunging into it, and the new one all arise from observations using multiple radio telescopes worldwide. But the new one shows light emitted at a longer wavelength, expanding what can be seen.

Hard to observe by their very nature, black holes are celestial entities exerting gravitational pull so strong no matter or light can escape once caught in their grasp.

Most galaxies are built around supermassive black holes. Some are known not only to guzzle any surrounding material but also to unleash huge and blazingly bright jets of high-energy particles far into space – beyond the very galaxy from which they originate.

The new image shows how the base of such a jet connects with material swirling around the black hole in a ring-like structure.

The entire system around a black hole is captured in the image for the first time. It shows the base of the jet of hot plasma, a fuzzy ring of light from hot plasma falling into the black hole, and a central dark area – sort of a donut hole – created by the black hole’s presence. Plasma – the fourth state of matter after solids, liquids and gases – is material so hot that some or all its atoms are split into high-energy subatomic particles.

“The image underlines for the first time the connection between the accretion flow (material pulled inward) near the central supermassive black hole and the origin of the jet,” said astrophysicist Ru-Sen Lu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature.

Seeing the entire scene in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole can be insightful.

“This helps to better understand the complicated physics around black holes, how jets are launched and accelerated and how matter inflow into the black hole and matter outflow are related,” said astrophysicist and study co-author Thomas Krichbaum of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany.

“This is what astronomers and astrophysicists have been wanting to see for more than half a century,” said astrophysicist and study co-author Kazunori Akiyama of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Haystack Observatory. “This is the dawn of an exciting new era.”

Lu, Krichbaum and Akiyama are members of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, an international collaboration begun in 2012 with the goal of directly observing a black hole’s immediate environment. A black hole’s event horizon is the point beyond which anything – stars, planets, gas, dust and all forms of electromagnetic radiation – gets swallowed into oblivion.

The EHT project has yielded the images of the two supermassive black holes. The second one – released last year – shows the one inhabiting the Milky Way’s center, called Sagittarius A, or Sgr A.

“We expect a similar environment to also exist for Sgr A*,” Lu said. – Rappler.com

Final pings of data in the moments before the planned touchdown showed the lander’s speed rapidly increasing, leading engineers at mission control in Tokyo to determine a successful landing was “not achievable,” ispace said in a statement.

“We lost communication, so we have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface,” founder and chief executive Takeshi Hakamada said on a company livestream shortly after communication from the spacecraft ceased.

Success would have been a welcome change from recent setbacks Japan has faced in space technology, where it aims to build a domestic industry, including a goal of sending Japanese astronauts to the moon by the late 2020s.

But a lunar landing would be an ambitious feat for a private firm. Only the United States, the former Soviet Union and China have soft-landed spacecraft on the moon, with attempts in recent years by India and a private Israeli company ending in failure.

The Japanese firm “determined that there is a high probability that the lander eventually made a hard landing.”

In disclosure to the Tokyo Stock Exchange, ispace said it did not expect an immediate impact on its earnings forecast. The startup delivers payloads such as rovers to the moon and sells related data. It does not expect to book any profit until around 2025.

Brakes on a ski slope

Four months after launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a SpaceX rocket, the M1 lander appeared set to autonomously touch down at about 12:40 pm Eastern time (1640 GMT Tuesday), with an animation based on live telemetry data showing it coming as close as 90 metres (295 feet) from the lunar surface.

By the expected touchdown time, mission control had lost contact with the lander and engineers appeared anxious over the live stream as they awaited signal confirmation of its fate which never came.

“Our engineers will continue to investigate the situation,” Hakamada said at the time. “At this moment, what I can tell you is we are very proud of the fact that we have already achieved many things during this Mission 1.”

The lander completed eight out of 10 mission objectives in space that will provide valuable data for the next landing attempt in 2024, Hakamada said.

Roughly an hour before planned touchdown, the 2.3 meter tall M1 began its landing phase, gradually tightening its orbit around the moon from 100 km (62 miles) above the surface to roughly 25 km, traveling at nearly 6,000 km/hour (3,700 mph).

At such velocity, slowing the lander to the correct speed against the moon’s gravitational pull is like squeezing the brakes of a bicycle right at the edge of a ski-jumping slope, Chief Technology Officer Ryo Ujiie told reporters on Monday.

The craft was aiming for a landing site at the edge of Mare Frigoris in the moon’s northern hemisphere where it would have deployed a two-wheeled, baseball-sized rover developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Tomy Co Ltd and Sony Group Corporation It also planned to deploy a four-wheeled rover dubbed Rashid from the United Arab Emirates.

The lander was also carrying an experimental solid-state battery made by Niterra Co Ltd among other devices to gauge their performance on the moon. – Rappler.com

The motorized rover Zhurong, named after a mythical Chinese god of fire, was expected to have woken up in December after entering a planned sleep mode in May 2022 as falling solar radiation with the advent of winter cut its power generation.

An unforeseen pile-up of dust most likely affected power generation and Zhurong’s ability to wake up, Chinese state television reported on Tuesday, April 25, quoting Zhang Rongqiao, chief designer of China’s Mars exploration program.

A camera on board a NASA probe orbiting Mars showed the Chinese rover had not moved since at least September, according to official images.

The 240-kg (530-pound) Zhurong, which has six scientific instruments including a high-resolution topography camera, was tasked with studying the planet’s surface soil and atmosphere after landing with no mishap in May 2021.

Powered by solar energy, Zhurong also looked for signs of ancient life, including any subsurface water and ice, using a ground-penetrating radar.

The rover had explored the Martian surface for 358 days and travelled for 1,921 metres (2,100 yards), Zhang said, far exceeding its original mission time-span of three months.

Aside from Zhurong, two other robotic rovers have been operating on Mars – NASA’s Perseverance and Curiosity, with the former roaming the planet’s surface for more than two years and the latter for over a decade. – Rappler.com

Rather than seeing the fiery disintegration of Musk’s colossal, next-generation Starship system as a setback, experts said the dramatic loss of the rocket ship would help accelerate development of the vehicle.

Images of the Starship tumbling out of control some 20 miles up in the sky while mounted to its Super Heavy rocket booster before the combined vehicle blew to bits dominated media coverage of the highly anticipated launch.

SpaceX acknowledged that several of the Super Heavy’s 33 powerful Raport engines malfunctioned on ascent and that the booster rocket and Starship failed to separate as designed before the ill-fated flight was terminated.

But SpaceX executives including Musk – the founder, CEO, and chief engineer of the California-based rocket company – hailed the test flight for achieving the major objective of getting the vehicle off the ground while providing a wealth of data that will advance Starship’s development.

Practice makes perfect

At least two experts in aerospace engineering and planetary science who spoke with Reuters agreed that the test flight delivered benefits.

“This is a classical SpaceX successful failure,” said Garrett Reisman, an astronautical engineering professor at the University of Southern California who is a former NASA astronaut and is also a senior adviser to SpaceX.

Reisman called the Starship test flight a hallmark of a SpaceX strategy that sets Musk’s company apart from traditional aerospace companies and even NASA by “this embracing of failure when the consequences of failure are low.”

No astronauts were aboard for the crewless flight, and the rocket was flown almost entirely over water from the Gulf Coast Starbase facility in south Texas to avoid possible injuries or property damage on the ground from falling debris.

“Even though that rocket costs a lot of money, what really costs a lot of money are people’s salaries,” Reisman told Reuters in an interview hours after Thursday’s launch.

Reisman said SpaceX saves more money in the long run, and takes less time to identify and correct engineering flaws by taking more risks in the development process rather than keeping “a large team working for years and years and years trying to get it perfect before you even try it.”

“I would say the timeline for transporting people (aboard Starship) is accelerated right now compared to what it was a couple of hours ago,” Reisman said.

Planetary scientist Tanya Harrison, a fellow at the University of British Columbia’s Outer Space Institute, said clearing the launch tower and ascending through a critical point known as maximum aerodynamic pressure were major feats on the first flight of such a large, complex launch system.

“It’s part of the testing process,” she said in an interview. “There are a lot of accidents that happen when you’re trying to design a new rocket. The fact that it launched at all made a lot of people really happy.”

She said the risks of a single flight test were small in comparison to the ambitious gains at stake.

“This is the biggest rocket that humanity has tried to build,” she said, adding that it is designed to carry “orders of magnitude” more cargo and people to and from deep space than any existing spacecraft.

Whereas NASA is working on a mission to retrieve samples of Martian soil and minerals measured in kilograms being collected by the Mars Perseverance rover, Starship will carry back many tons of rock, as well transport dozens of astronauts and entire lab facilities to and from the moon and Mars, Harrison said.

Musk has billed Starship as crucial to SpaceX’s interplanetary exploration goals as well as its more near-term launch business, with commercial satellites, science telescopes and eventually paying astro-tourists expected to use the fully reusable rocket system for rides to space.

Citing SpaceX’s rapid pace of development since its 2002 founding, leading to dozens of commercial missions a year with its workhorse rocket for low-Earth orbit, the Falcon 9, Harrison said, “it wouldn’t surprise me if we had humans on Mars with Starship in the next decade.” – Rappler.com

While the two-stage rocket ship failed to make it beyond an altitude of 20 miles (32 km), SpaceX officials cheered the outcome for achieving the test flight’s primary objective of getting the new spacecraft off the ground in what appeared to be an otherwise clean liftoff.

NASA chief Bill Nelson tweeted: “Congrats to @SpaceX on Starship’s first integrated flight test! Every great achievement throughout history has demanded some level of calculated risk, because with great risk comes great reward. Looking forward to all that SpaceX learns, to the next flight test — and beyond.”

The two-stage rocket ship, standing taller than the Statue of Liberty at 394 feet (120 meters) high, blasted off from the company’s Starbase spaceport east of Brownsville, Texas, for what SpaceX hoped, at best, would be a 90-minute debut flight into space but just shy of Earth orbit.

A live SpaceX webcast of the liftoff showed the rocket ship rising from the Gulf Coast launch tower into the morning sky over the southern tip of Texas as the Super Heavy’s Raptor engines roared to life in a ball of flame and billowing clouds of exhaust and water vapor.

But less than four minutes into the flight, the upper-stage Starship failed to separate as designed from the lower-stage Super Heavy, and the combined vehicle was seen beginning to tumble end over end before exploding.

The spacecraft reached a peak altitude of nearly 20 miles (32 km) before its fiery disintegration.

A senior Federal Aviation Administration source said the spacecraft’s automated flight-termination appears likely to have been activated, triggering the rocket’s disintegration.

Nevertheless, SpaceX officials on the webcast hailed the feat of getting the Starship and booster rocket off the launch pad for the first time, declaring the brief episode in that sense to be a successful test flight.

A throng of SpaceX workers shown during the webcast watching a livestream together at the company’s headquarters near Los Angeles cheered wildly as the rocket cleared the launch tower and again when it blew up in the sky.

SpaceX principal integration engineer John Insprucker, serving as one of the webcast commentators, said the test flight would provide a wealth of important data paving the way for the company to move ahead with additional tests.

Musk, the founder, chief executive and chief engineer of SpaceX, said on Twitter that the next Starship test launch would be “in a few months.”

“Congrats @SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship! Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months,” he tweeted. Musk, who purchased Twitter last year for $44 billion, is also CEO of electric carmaker Tesla Inc.

Beyond the launch itself, the test mission fell short of reaching several other objectives, such as deploying the Starship vessel into space and reentering Earth’s atmosphere 60 miles (97 km) off a Hawaiian coast at hypersonic speeds, where it would have faced key aerodynamic forces and blazing heat before plunging into the Pacific.

Still, getting the newly combined Starship and booster rocket off the ground for the first time represented a key milestone in SpaceX’s ambition of sending astronauts back to the moon and ultimately on to Mars, as a major partner in NASA’s newly inaugurated human spaceflight program, Artemis. – Rappler.com