SpaceX’s uncrewed spacecraft Starship, which was developed to carry astronauts to the moon and beyond, failed in space shortly after lifting off on Saturday. It’s the company’s second test flight, but even though it didn’t go all the way, it made it further than an earlier attempt that 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, helping boost the Starship spacecraft as high as 90 miles (148 km) above ground on a planned 90-minute mission. The first stage of the rocketship, a large booster called Super Heavy, burned up and exploded after about 4 minutes into the flight.
The failure was reminiscent of the first test of Starship in April when several of the Super Heavy’s 33 engines unexpectedly powered off, and the rocket began spiraling out of control moments after liftoff. It ultimately exploded, destroying the reusable Super Heavy booster and the Starship spacecraft that was supposed to be tucked inside.
This time, all 33 Raptor engines powering the first stage of Starship fired throughout the boost phase of the mission. And when the first stage was preparing to separate from Starship and begin descending toward a controlled water landing in the Gulf of Mexico, its engineers used a new system called “hot staging.” That involves firing up the Starship spacecraft’s engines to force it away from Super Heavy while still in flight. That process worked as intended, allowing the booster to separate from Starship and fall into the ocean before it detonated.
But a few minutes into the flight, SpaceX lost contact with Starship and confirmed on its livestream that it had been forced to trigger the spacecraft’s flight termination system, which slammed it into the atmosphere with enough force to destroy it. The company hasn’t given details on what went wrong, but the “hot staging” approach may have damaged Starship.
The Starship spacecraft was built to be the launching platform for SpaceX’s ambition to make a fleet of large vehicles that would eventually take both people and cargo to the moon for NASA and other customers and then to Mars. The failure of this test flight could delay those plans significantly. But Quilty says he believes the company will still be able to do much of its essential work without Starship, mainly if it develops a version of the first stage that can land vertically on a barge rather than taking up valuable launch pad real estate.
The FAA has begun a mishap investigation of the mission, which is standard for any space flight that goes differently than planned. It will be up to SpaceX to determine the root cause of the failure and how it will fix it for future Starship tests. And that’s going to be a big job. The two-part rocketship is a giant: Fully stacked with its Super Heavy booster, it stands 397 feet tall and is nearly 30 feet in diameter. It’s the largest, most powerful vehicle ever flown, and it was slated to complete one full revolution of Earth on its initial trip into space and then splash down in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.
