In 9th flight test, SpaceX launches Starship but doesn’t complete the mission

Elon Musk and SpaceX are getting a little closer to sending humans to Mars, but they still have plenty of work to do.

After the last two test flights ended prematurely with the destruction of the spacecraft, Tuesday’s Starship launch demonstrated that the vehicle could successfully reach orbit. However, an apparent propellant leak after the craft entered its suborbital trajectory caused a loss of attitude control, leaving the spacecraft spinning and mission control unable to control the craft.

Without the ability to steer the craft, SpaceX said it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere at an angle that is not ideal for its heat shield. As a result, most of it was expected to burn up, with the remaining pieces falling into the Indian Ocean. The company said it cleared a large area of the landing zone to ensure public safety.

The company posted a statement on X reading, “As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly. Teams will continue to review data and work toward our next flight test. With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multiplanetary.”

Mounted atop a Super Heavy rocket that’s powered by 33 Raptor engines, the uncrewed Starship successfully lifted off from SpaceX’s Starbase test facility in South Texas just after 7:30 p.m. ET. The sound of the building shaking was audible as all 33 engines lit on the powerful rocket that propelled Starship past the tower and into its planned suborbital trajectory.

At nearly 400 feet tall, SpaceX says the Starship and its booster are the most powerful rocket system ever developed. And unlike the company’s partially reusable Falcon 9, SpaceX aims for Starship to be fully reusable and capable of launching, landing and flying again with minimal maintenance.

Tuesday’s launch is part of SpaceX’s iterative approach to engineering. With each mission, the company evaluates the data, makes adjustments to the spacecraft, and builds upon its previous successes and lessons learned from failures. Those flight test learnings are applied to future vehicles and missions until Starship is ready for passengers.

For Tuesday’s mission, SpaceX made significant modifications to the upper stage based on lessons learned from previous flight tests, including the last two that resulted in the destruction of the Starship.

During Starship’s eighth flight test in early March, several engines shut down unexpectedly about 5 1/2 minutes into the launch, resulting in SpaceX losing control of the craft. Communication with the vehicle was lost several minutes later.

After an investigation, the company said a “hardware failure” with one of the engines caused fuel to mix and ignite where it shouldn’t have. And while the ship wasn’t instructed to self-destruct, SpaceX says it likely did so automatically.

As Starship broke up, debris fell across South Florida and parts of the Atlantic, leading to ground stops at nearby airports. Photos and videos shared on social media showed rocket debris streaking across the sky.

A similar failure occurred in January when stronger-than-expected vibrations caused a propellant leak and explosion. In both cases, the upper stage was lost, but the first-stage booster was successfully returned to the launch site and caught using giant robotic “chopsticks” attached to the launch tower.

SpaceX said it has made significant modifications to the upper stage based on what it learned from previous flight tests and noted that while both failures occurred around the same time during the missions, the causes were unrelated.

No astronauts were aboard the previous missions, and none were onboard this time.

According to SpaceX, Tuesday’s ninth test marked “the first launch of a flight-proven Super Heavy booster,” one that flew and returned during the seventh test flight. Of the booster’s 33 engines, 29 were also reused from the previous test. Engineers inspected and replaced known single-use components, such as the heat shield, but left the booster mostly intact to study real-world wear and tear.

Unlike the previous two missions, where the heavy booster returned to its launch site, during Tuesday’s launch, the booster followed a modified flight path that included a flip before it appears to have exploded while splashing down in the Gulf. Data and video were lost before the booster hit the water, but the company said that it ultimately ended up in the ocean.

After achieving its planned trajectory in space, Starship’s upper stage tried to deploy a set of mock Starlink satellites to test its payload deployment capabilities. However, mission control was unable to get the doors open for the test. SpaceX said they will try it again on a future mission.

After the SpaceX Starship exploded in March during that test flight, Musk wrote “rockets are hard” on X. On Tuesday evening, it was a stark reminder of just how hard space travel can be.