SpaceX’s massive deep-space rocket system, Starship, lifted off safely this Saturday morning, but ended prematurely with an explosion and a loss of signal. The Super Heavy booster and the Starship spacecraft successfully separated after liftoff, as the Starship fired its engines and pulled away. However, that process ended up destroying the Super Heavy booster, which exploded in a ball of flames over the Gulf of Mexico. The Starship spacecraft was able to briefly continue its journey. The Starship system managed to fly much further than the first attempt in April and lifted off from the launch pad at 8 a.m. ET, with the Super Heavy booster igniting its 33 engines.
Starship’s upper stage began its journey Saturday morning strapped to the top of the Super Heavy first stage, a 232-foot-tall (70.7-meter-tall) rocket. About two and a half minutes after jumping off the launch pad, the Super Heavy booster expended most of its fuel, and the Starship spacecraft ignited its own engines and separated.
The Starship spacecraft used its own six engines to continue propelling itself at faster speeds as SpaceX aimed to send the spacecraft at near-orbital speeds, typically around 17,500 miles per hour (28,000 kilometers per hour). However, the SpaceX team announced during the live broadcast that the “second stage was lost.”
Aerospace engineer John Insprucker explained, “The automated system of second stage flight termination appears to have been activated very late in the fire as we headed toward the Gulf of Mexico.” If everything had gone according to plan, Starship would have continued accelerating into space and completed almost a full orbit around Earth, aiming to land in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.
The destruction of the vehicle shortly after liftoff was reminiscent of the Starship’s first launch attempt in April, when the vehicle was lost shortly after liftoff. The test flight didn’t get very far, as not all of the Super Heavy’s engines were on and the rocket took off in an almost horizontal direction. The rocket then began to spin overhead as it began to rise over the Gulf of Mexico, forcing SpaceX to press the self-destruct button and explode the rocket to prevent any danger.
Despite the mishap, SpaceX attempted to frame the mission as a crucial learning experience, as the company has long been known to make explosive mistakes during rocket development with the goal of learning more quickly than if it only depended on ground tests. This latest setback will surely inform production as SpaceX continues to work toward its goal of sending humans to Mars.