Hours ago, a prototype of SpaceX’s Starship rocket exploded during a landing attempt minutes after a high-altitude experimental launch from Boca Chica, Texas.
The explosion of Starship SN9 marks a repeat of an accident that destroyed a previous test rocket, the SN8, on its final descent. The SN8 was a test model of the heavy-lift rocket being developed by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s private space company to carry humans and 100 tons of cargo on future missions to the moon and Mars.
The self-guided, 16-story-tall rocket initially launched from the Gulf Coast launch pad, South Texas, while the launcj was being aired on SpaceX’s livestream coverage.
Reaching its peak altitude of about 10 km (6 miles), the spacecraft then hovered momentarily in midair, shut off its engines and executed a planned “belly-flop” maneuver to descend nose-down under aerodynamic control back toward Earth.
According to media reports, the explosion happened when the Starship, after flipping its nose upward again to begin its landing sequence, tried to reactivate two of its three Raptor thrusters, but one failed to ignite. The rocket then fell rapidly to the ground, exploding in a roaring ball of flames, smoke and debris - 6 minutes and 26 seconds after launch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLgG03ERMKI
A SpaceX commentator for Tuesday’s launch webcast said the rocket’s flight to its test altitude, along with most of its subsonic re-entry, “looked very good and stable, like we saw last December”, in reference to SN8 fate.
“We just have to work on that landing a little bit,” the commentator said, adding, “This is a test flight, the second time we’ve flown Starship in this configuration.”
On its part, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said it would oversee an investigation of Tuesday’s landing mishap, as it did following the previous explosion - an inquiry that revealed tensions between Musk and the agency.
SpaceX conducted December’s launch “without demonstrating” that public safety risks posed by “far-field blast overpressure” met the terms of its regulatory permit, according to the FAA. But the agency said “corrective actions” the company later took were approved by the FAA and incorporated into Tuesday’s launch.
“We anticipate taking no further enforcement action on the SN8 matter,” the agency’s statement said.
The complete Starship rocket, which will stand 394-feet (120 meters) tall when mated with its super-heavy first-stage booster, is the company’s next-generation fully reusable launch vehicle - the center of Musk’s ambitions to make human space travel more affordable and routine.
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