SpaceX’s second test flight ended in disaster after the vehicle’s spacecraft blew up about 15 minutes after liftoff.
The two-stage rocketship blasted off from the Elon Musk-owned company’s Starbase launch site near Boca Chica in Texas, soaring roughly 55 miles (90 km) above ground on a planned 90-minute flight into space.
But the rocket’s Super Heavy first stage booster, though it appeared to achieve a crucial maneuver to separate from its core stage, exploded over the Gulf of Mexico shortly after detaching.
“The booster experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly shortly after stage separation while Starship’s engines fired for several minutes on its way to space,” SpaceX shared on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“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 multi-planetary.”
The launch was the second attempt to fly Starship mounted atop its towering Super Heavy rocket booster, following an April attempt that failed about four minutes after lift-off.
A live SpaceX webcast of Saturday’s launch showed the rocketship rising from the launch tower into the morning sky as the Super Heavy’s cluster of powerful Raptor engines thundered to life.
The test flight’s principal objective was to get Starship off the ground and into space just shy of Earth’s obit. Doing so would have marked a key step toward achieving SpaceX’s ambition of producing a large, multi-purpose spacecraft capable of sending people and cargo back to the moon later this decade for NASA, and ultimately to Mars.
Musk – SpaceX’s founder, chief executive, and chief engineer – also sees Starship as eventually replacing the company’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket as the centerpiece of its launch business that already lofts most of the world’s satellites and other commercial payloads into space.
NASA, SpaceX’s primary customer, has a considerable stake in the success of Starship, which the U.S. space agency is counting on to play a central role in its human spaceflight program, Artemis, the successor to the Apollo missions of more than a half-century ago that put astronauts on the moon for the first time.
The mission’s objective was to get Starship off the ground in Texas and into space just shy of reaching orbit, then plunge through Earth’s atmosphere for a splashdown off Hawaii’s coast. The launch had been scheduled for Friday but was pushed back by a day for a last-minute swap of flight-control hardware.
During its April 20 test flight, the spacecraft blew itself to bits less than four minutes into a planned 90-minute flight that flight went awry from the start.
SpaceX has acknowledged that some of the Super Heavy’s 33 Raptor engines malfunctioned on ascent and that the lower-stage booster rocket failed to separate as designed from the upper-stage Starship before the flight was terminated.
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