By Joe Skipper, Joey Roulette and Steve Gorman
BOCA CHICA, Texas (Reuters) -SpaceX’s uncrewed spacecraft Starship, developed to carry astronauts to the moon and beyond, reached space for the first time on Saturday but was presumed to have failed minutes later, in a second test after its first attempt to reach space ended in an explosion.
The two-stage rocketship, blasted off from the Elon Musk-owned company’s Starbase launch site near Boca Chica in Texas, on a planned 90-minute flight into space, but contact was lost roughly 10 minutes after lift-off, a company broadcaster said.
“We have lost the data from the second stage… we think we may have lost the second stage,” SpaceX’s livestream host John Insprucker said.
(Reporting by Joe Skipper at Boca Chica, Texas, Joey Roulette in Washington and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Ros Russell)
