BOCA CHICA, Texas, Nov 18 (Portal) – SpaceX’s unmanned Starship spacecraft, designed to carry astronauts to the moon and beyond, is reported to have failed on its second test in space minutes after launch on Saturday, after his first attempt in the year ended in an explosion.
The two-stage rocket lifted off from the Elon Musk-owned company’s Starbase launch site near Boca Chica, Texas, carrying the Starship spacecraft into space about 55 miles (90 km) above the ground on a planned 90-minute flight.
But the rocket’s Super Heavy first stage booster exploded over the Gulf of Mexico shortly after separation, despite appearing to have completed a crucial maneuver to separate from its Starship core stage, a SpaceX webcast showed.
Meanwhile, the Starship booster core continued toward space, but a few minutes later a company broadcaster reported that SpaceX mission control had suddenly lost contact with the spacecraft.
“We lost the second stage data… we believe we may have lost the second stage,” said SpaceX livestream host John Insprucker.
About eight minutes into the test mission, a camera view tracking the Starship booster appeared to show an explosion, suggesting the vehicle had failed at that point. The rocket’s altitude was 91 miles (148 km).
The launch was the second attempt to fly Starship on its giant Super Heavy launch vehicle, after an attempt in April ended in explosive failure about four minutes after liftoff.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, which oversees commercial launch sites, confirmed a mishap that “resulted in the loss of the vehicle,” adding that no injuries or property damage were reported.
The agency said it will oversee a SpaceX-led investigation into the test failure and must approve SpaceX’s plan to prevent something like this from happening again.
[1/8]SpaceX’s next-generation Starship spacecraft lifts off on its powerful Super Heavy rocket from the company’s Boca Chica launch pad for an uncrewed test flight near Brownsville, Texas, U.S., November 18, 2023. Portal/Joe Skipper Acquires License Rights
The goal of the mission was to lift Starship off the ground in Texas and launch it into space just before it reached orbit, then plunge through Earth’s atmosphere to splash down off the coast of Hawaii. The launch was scheduled for Friday but was postponed by a day due to a last-minute flight control hardware replacement.
The ignition of Starship’s 33 Raptor engines sent a shockwave across SpaceX’s Starbase launch facilities just before the rocket system began to gradually rise into the morning sky and leave its launch tower in a thunderous climb toward space.
At an altitude of about 43 miles (70 km), the rocket system performed the crucial maneuver to separate the two stages, with the Super Heavy booster set to plunge into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico while the central Starship booster powered on its own engines shot further into space.
But Super Heavy exploded and SpaceX has not yet detailed the fate of the core stage.
SpaceX said in a post on the social media platform X that the spacecraft’s core stage engines “fired for several minutes en route to space.”
“In a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multiplanetary,” the company said.
A successful test would have been an important step toward realizing SpaceX’s goal of building a large, versatile spacecraft that could send people and cargo back to the moon and eventually Mars for NASA later this decade.
Musk – founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX – also sees Starship as replacing the company’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket as the centerpiece of his launch business, which already carries most of the world’s satellites and other commercial payloads into space.
NASA, SpaceX’s primary customer, has played a significant role in Starship’s success. The US space agency expects it to play a central role in its Artemis manned space program, the successor to the Apollo missions of more than half a century ago that put astronauts on the moon for the first time.
During the test flight on April 20, the spacecraft shattered less than four minutes into the planned 90-minute flight. The flight went wrong from the start as some engines failed during takeoff. Ultimately, a fire inside the rocket was responsible for the rocket’s stage separation failure, Musk said.
Reporting by Joe Skipper in Boca Chica, Texas, Joey Roulette in Washington and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Will Dunham and Ros Russell
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