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SpaceX’s Starship spiraled out of control while in space during a test flight on Thursday, marking the second launch in a row that the vehicle has run into a fatal problem on its way to orbit.
The company launched Starship using its Super Heavy booster and things looked normal for the first eight minutes of the flight prior to the problem. The ship successfully separated and headed into space, while the booster came back to the company’s launchpad in Texas, where it was caught for a third time by the launch tower.
But at around eight minutes and nine seconds into the flight, SpaceX’s broadcast graphics showed Starship lose multiple Raptor engines on the vehicle. On-board footage showed the ship started spiraling end over end over the Gulf of Mexico.
“We just saw some engines go out, it looks like we are losing attitude control of the ship,” SpaceX communications manager Dan Huot said on the broadcast. “At this point we have lost contact with the ship.”
SpaceX was hoping to deploy four dummy versions of its Starlink satellites during the test flight, a step towards the goal of using Starship for commercial missions.
SpaceX is purposely developing Starship by doing test flights like these, and learning from the things that go both right and wrong. But Thursday’s failure comes just a few weeks after the seventh test flight, which saw Starship break up in spectacular fashion over the islands of Turks & Caicos, which caused the FAA to divert a number of flights in that airspace.
This is a developing story…
Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.
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