SpaceX Starship prototype rocket explodes on landing after test launch

A prototype of SpaceX’s Starship rocket exploded throughout a touchdown try minutes after a high-altitude experimental launch from Boca Chica, Texas, on Tuesday, in a repeat of an accident that destroyed a earlier check rocket.

The Starship SN9 that blew up on its remaining descent, just like the SN8 earlier than it, was a check mannequin of the heavy-lift rocket being developed by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s personal area firm to hold people and 100 tons of cargo on future missions to the moon and Mars.

The self-guided, 16-story-tall rocket initially soared into the clear, blue South Texas sky from its Gulf Coast launch pad on what appeared from SpaceX’s livestream protection to be a flawless liftoff.

Reaching its peak altitude of about 10 km (6 miles), the spacecraft then hovered momentarily in midair, shut off its engines and executed a deliberate “belly-flop” maneuver to descend nose-down beneath aerodynamic management again towards Earth.

The difficulty got here when the Starship, after flipping its nostril upward once more to start its touchdown sequence, tried to reactivate two of its three Raptor thrusters, however one did not ignite. The rocket then fell quickly to the bottom, exploding in a roaring ball of flames, smoke and particles – 6 minutes and 26 seconds after launch.

On Tuesday, February 2, SpaceX Starship serial quantity 9 (SN9) carried out the second high-altitude suborbital flight check of a Starship prototype from Cameron County, Texas [full video: https://t.co/yO5rR9qQnr] pic.twitter.com/OoKTEvgJLN

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) February 2, 2021

The Starship SN8, the primary prototype to fly in a high-altitude check launch, met an identical destiny in December. No accidents occurred in both incident.

A SpaceX commentator for Tuesday’s launch webcast stated the rocket’s flight to its check altitude, together with most of its subsonic re-entry, “looked very good and stable, like we saw last December.”

“We just have to work on that landing a little bit,” the commentator stated, including, “This is a test flight, the second time we’ve flown Starship in this configuration.”

There was no quick remark from Musk, who additionally heads the electrical carmaker Tesla Inc. Hours earlier, Musk stated on Twitter he deliberate to remain off the social media platform “for a while.”

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) stated it might oversee an investigation of Tuesday’s touchdown mishap, because it did following the earlier explosion – an inquiry that exposed tensions between Musk and the company.

SpaceX carried out December’s launch “without demonstrating” that public security dangers posed by “far-field blast overpressure” met the phrases of its regulatory allow, based on the FAA. However the company stated “corrective actions” the corporate later took have been permitted by the FAA and integrated into Tuesday’s launch.

“We anticipate taking no further enforcement action on the SN8 matter,” the company’s assertion stated.

Final week, Musk tweeted that the FAA’s “space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure” and that “humanity will never get to Mars” beneath its guidelines.

The whole Starship rocket, which is able to stand 394-feet (120 meters) tall when mated with its super-heavy first-stage booster, is the corporate’s next-generation totally reusable launch automobile – the middle of Musk’s ambitions to make human area journey extra reasonably priced and routine.

A primary orbital Starship flight is deliberate for yr’s finish. Musk has stated he intends to fly Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa across the moon with the Starship in 2023.