SpaceX's colossal Starship rocket suffered a leak, tumbled out of control in space and disintegrated as it hurtled back to Earth during a test flight on Tuesday, in a third setback in a row for the Elon Musk-led company.
The launch system, comprised of the Starship upper portion and its Super Heavy booster, thundered off the company's launchpad in South Texas at around 6:36 p.m. local time. As the rocket lifted off, around 1.1 million people tuned in on X.
A few minutes into the flight, the recycled Super Heavy booster separated from the Starship upper portion and fired its engines. But as it maneuvered itself into position and plunged back to Earth, it suffered an apparent problem and exploded, SpaceX commentators said, adding that it was expected to make a hard splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico regardless.
Starship made it to the scheduled ship engine cutoff, so big improvement over last flight! Also, no significant loss of heat shield tiles during ascent.
Leaks caused loss of main tank pressure during the coast and re-entry phase. Lot of good data to review.
Launch cadence forβ¦SpaceX then appeared to fall short of another key milestone planned for the mission: using Starship to deploy a slate of dummy satellites. Starship made it to space but launch commentators said the vehicle's bay door didn't open as expected, cutting that test short. The satellite simulators are designed to mimic upgraded Starlink internet satellites the rocket is meant to carry when it's operational.
Then around 35 minutes into the mission, as Starship hurtled toward Earth's atmosphere on its journey home, the livestream started to cut in and out. At one point, SpaceX commentator Dan Huot told viewers the vehicle had lost control and that the rocket was spinning, unable to set itself up for a controlled reentry and to withstand the intense heat and pressure of the atmosphere during descent. The vehicle βmet its demise,β said another SpaceX commentator, Jessie Anderson.
βWe have been dealing with some leaks on the ship,β Huot said, referring to its fuel tank systems. βThis is also what led to that loss of attitude control.β
SpaceX stressed that the company learns from every test flight. βWe're going to learn, iterate and iterate over and over again,β Anderson said.
After the launch, Musk had planned an all-hands-style talk with employees at 8 p.m. local time out of the company's newly incorporated city, Starbase, in South Texas. As of 9 p.m., it hadn't started and there was no word on why. The mission came as Musk, the world's richest person, says he is stepping back from his political work in Washington and focusing on his business empire.
The Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses Starship flights, said it was aware βan anomaly occurredβ and is actively working with SpaceX on the event. There are no reports of public injury or damage to public property, it added.
The stakes for Tuesday's flight were particularly high after flights in January and March were cut short just minutes after takeoff when the spacecraft exploded over the Gulf of Mexico, sending streams of debris raining down from the sky and disrupting air travel.
The results failed to live up to earlier flights when the vehicle made it to space, partially circled the globe, survived the plunge through the atmosphere and splashed into the ocean roughly as planned.
Starship is critical to Musk's and SpaceX's Mars vision. As the world's largest and most powerful launch system, Starship is meant to serve as the primary spacecraft for transporting people to the Red Planet and then bringing them back to Earth. Musk has recently declared that SpaceX will send a Starship rocket to Mars carrying robots built by his electric car company, Tesla Inc., as early as 2026 β an incredibly ambitious timeline.
SpaceX also holds contracts with NASA worth roughly $4 billion to land the agency's astronauts on the moon with Starship β making it a key part of America's space ambitions.
Past Failures
SpaceX blamed the botched January test on unexpectedly intense vibrations that worsened a propellant leak, leading to fires throughout the vehicle. As for the March failure, the company said that one of Starship's Raptor engines likely had a hardware issue, causing propellants to mix together at the wrong time and ultimately leading to the explosion.
The company said it led investigations into each of the incidents and made fixes to prevent the problems from happening again. The company also said that the two failures were βdistinctly differentβ from one another, despite the explosions occurring around the same time in each flight. Additionally, future Starship vehicles will be equipped with new βRaptor 3β engines that are supposed to be more reliable.
Despite the repeated flight failures, SpaceX was still able to βcatchβ Starship's massive Super Heavy booster back at the rocket's launch tower following each flight β an impressive feat the company managed to do for the first time last year.
For this ninth launch, the company didn't attempt a midair capture of the vehicle. Instead, SpaceX chose to re-fly one of the Super Heavy boosters it caught previously β a first for the company.
As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly. Teams will continue to review data and work toward our next flight test.
With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today's test will help us improve Starship'sβ¦Designed to be fully reusable, Starship will be much cheaper to fly than any other rocket, according to SpaceX, and will eventually replace the company's industry-leading Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.
But to meet that promise of delivering a fully reusable rocket, SpaceX must refine its technique for recovering all of the pieces of Starship after launch.
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