- SpaceX’s Starship spun out of control and fell out of contact just as it reached space Thursday.
- Starship was supposed to deploy mock Starlink satellites and test its structural limits during reentry.
- It’s not yet clear where debris might fall or how much this incident will set back Elon Musk’s plans.
SpaceX’s Starship lost control and started spinning wildly just as it reached space on Thursday, and will likely rain debris down on Earth along its pre-designated flight path.
“Unfortunately it seems we lost the attitude control on the ship,” Kate Tice, a webcast host and the senior manager of quality systems engineering at SpaceX, said after the ship began to visibly roll on SpaceX’s X livestream.
“We did lose contact with the ship,” Dan Huot, the other SpaceX webcast host, said.
SpaceX later confirmed in a post on X that the spaceship exploded, using its classic euphemism: “a rapid unscheduled disassembly.”
Starship was only about 20 seconds away from cutting off its engines, which is a major milestone it has passed on multiple flights and is basically the last step of getting itself into space. It was roughly eight minutes after the vehicle had lifted off for its eighth flight to space.
Some of the ship’s engines suddenly went out early, Huot said, and then it began to spin.
“We have some more to learn about this vehicle,” Huot said.
This is the second Starship flight in a row to explode as it climbed to space, taking Elon Musk’s biggest ambitions another step back.
Starship may rain down debris again
SpaceX said that it “immediately began coordination with safety officials” after the ship lost contact.
The incident comes just a month after a Starship exploded and rained down huge chunks of debris in the Caribbean, causing the Federal Aviation Administration to divert aircraft in the area and triggering an investigation.
“We’ve got some practice at this now,” Huot said. “We’ve got a lot of measures in place like debris-response areas where we coordinate very closely with air-traffic control. We have a lot of measures put before we ever launch a rocket to make sure that we’re keeping the public safe. Those worked last time and they’re actively in work right now.”
After the January flight, SpaceX made upgrades to avoid the fuel leaks and fire in the ship’s “attic area” which it pinpointed as the cause of the explosion. The company got reapproval from the FAA and flew again Thursday, only to lose Starship again.
“We will review the data from today’s flight test to better understand root cause,” SpaceX said in its X post.
The future of SpaceX and the space industry at large is on the line.
Starship’s many successes
The Starship-Super Heavy launch system — consisting of the lower-stage Super Heavy booster and upper-stage Starship rocket — promises to be the largest, most powerful, and first-ever fully reusable orbital rocket on Earth.
Its prowess could help cut the cost of spaceflight by an order of magnitude, but not anytime soon if SpaceX can’t keep Starship in one piece.
Starship has previously flown to space successfully, landed in the ocean with its engines firing, and seen its Super Heavy booster return to Earth and lower itself into a pair of chopstick-like arms on a landing tower.
On Thursday’s flight, just a few minutes before Starship’s demise, the booster landed flawlessly again.
As the booster slowed itself from supersonic speed, a thunder-like sonic boom sounded across the Texas coastal plain.
On the livestream shortly before launch, the SpaceX communications manager Chris Gebhardt said those booms are like “a spaceship telling everybody it wants to be reused.”
Starship, it seems, isn’t making the same declaration.
SpaceX was going to test Starship’s limits on the way back
The rocket’s successes so far have been promising for SpaceX’s plans to recover and reuse both Starship and the Super Heavy booster. SpaceX had hoped Thursday’s flight would take things a step further.
The flight had two primary goals: to deploy its first payload of mock Starlink satellites in space and to run experiments in Starship’s reentry and descent to Earth. It never got the chance.
The flight was intended to test the limits of Starship’s structure on its return to Earth, with some of its protective tiles removed from vulnerable areas for stress testing. By contrast, for the ascent to space, SpaceX had made upgrades to fortify Starship.
Musk founded the company in 2002 with the goal of bringing humans to Mars. Starship is the vehicle that’s supposed to make that happen.
Musk has said that, in addition to hauling astronauts and materials to the moon and conducting rapid point-to-point transport on Earth, Starship could carry 1 million people to Mars, along with all the necessary cargo for them to build a city there.
