Well, at least the rocket got a little farther up this time.
Down at Starbase, Elon Musk’s SpaceX base – and bonified municipality, as of earlier this month – on the edge of the South Texas Coast, Starship, the largest, most powerful rocket ever created, lifted off at 6:36 p.m. Tuesday.
The launch was smooth, uneventful and on time. As the next few minutes unfolded, all 33 raptor engines lit on Super Heavy, the booster. When they reached the hot stage – the point when the booster and the upper stage vehicle separate – this too went off without a hitch. (SpaceX’s Super Heavy boosters are meant to be resuable, but they opted to allow this one to do a hard splash into the Gulf of Mexico for this launch in order to do some testing. It blew up before they were even able to turn off its engines.)
And then, about 30 minutes into the uncrewed test flight, the upper stage vehicle sprang a propellant leak, which caused the spacecraft to start spinning. As it approached its re-entry point, the Starship vehicle couldn’t handle the heat and broke apart, its pieces scattering across the Indian Ocean.
Unlike the seventh flight test in January, which saw rocket debris scattered raining scattered across Turks and Caicos, this time by design the rocket pieces scattered across the Indian Ocean, away from any inhabited areas.
While this flight, the ninth, made it longer than any of the ones that have come before, it most likely isn’t being viewed as an unmitigated success.
Although this vehicle made it further into the flight than either the January or March launches, the explosion still occurred before SpaceX engineers were able to conduct any of their planned in-flight tests.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, newly dedicated to his quest to get to Mars and reportedly “stepping back” from politics, stated that the main focus of this launch was to test Starship’s heatshield. “It’s all about the tiles,” he said.
But SpaceX engineers didn’t get to collect any data on how the heatshield tiles performed.
In spite of this, Musk celebrated the wins they managed to score.
“Starship made it to the scheduled ship engine cutoff, so big improvement over last flight!” he wrote on X after the flight’s explosive end. “Also, no significant loss of heat shield tiles during ascent. Leaks caused loss of main tank pressure during the coast and re-entry phase.”
Afterward, Musk apparently wasn’t feeling chatty. He’d been scheduled to give a talk titled “The Road to Making Life Interplanetary” but made no mention of it after the launch.
He did announce that we should be seeing more of these launches soon. His plan is to send up test flights at a faster pace, with one going up every three or four weeks. It’s a fast pace, but it makes sense that he’s in a hurry. NASA is supposed to use Starship to get boots on the moon for Artemis III around 2028. To get to the moon and back, the company really does need to, you know, get through a test flight without going boom.
