SpaceX launched its Starship rocket on its latest test flight on Thursday, but the spacecraft was destroyed following a thrilling booster catch back at the pad.
Elon Musk’s company said Starship broke apart — what it called a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”
The spacecraft’s six engines appeared to shut down one by one during ascent, with contact lost just eight-and-a-half minutes into the flight.
Photo: AP
The spacecraft — a new and upgraded model making its debut — was supposed to soar across the Gulf of Mexico from Texas on a near loop around the world similar to previous test flights. SpaceX had packed it with 10 dummy satellites for practice at releasing them.
A minute before the loss, SpaceX used the launch tower’s giant mechanical arms to catch the returning booster, a feat achieved only once before. The descending booster hovered over the launch pad before being gripped by the pair of arms dubbed chopsticks.
The thrill of the catch quickly turned into disappointment for not only the company, but the crowds gathered along the southern tip of Texas.
“It was great to see a booster come down, but we are obviously bummed out about ship,” SpaceX spokesman Dan Huot said.
“It’s a flight test. It’s an experimental vehicle,” he stressed.
The last data received from the spacecraft indicated an altitude of 146km and a velocity of 21,317kph.
Musk said a preliminary analysis suggests leaking fuel might have built up pressure in a cavity above the engine firewall.
Fire suppression will be added to the area, with increased venting and double-checking for leaks, he wrote on X.
The 123m rocket had thundered away in late afternoon from Boca Chica Beach near the Mexican border. The late hour ensured a daylight entry halfway around the world in the Indian Ocean, but the shiny retro-looking spacecraft never got that far.
SpaceX had made improvements to the spacecraft for the latest demo and added a fleet of satellite mockups. The test satellites were the same size as SpaceX’s Starlink Internet satellites and, like the spacecraft, were meant to be destroyed upon entry.
Musk plans to launch actual Starlinks on Starships before moving on to other satellites and, eventually, crews. It was the seventh test flight for the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket.
NASA has reserved a pair of Starships to land astronauts on the moon later this decade. Musk’s goal is Mars.
Hours earlier in Florida, another billionaire’s rocket company — Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin — launched the newest supersized rocket, New Glenn. The rocket reached orbit on its first flight, successfully placing an experimental satellite thousands of kilometers above Earth. However, the first-stage booster was destroyed, missing its targeted landing on a floating platform in the Atlantic.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees