SpaceX Loses Starship in Unexpected Test Flight Setback

(Bloomberg) — SpaceX lost its Starship rocket during its seventh test flight, an unexpected setback after the Elon Musk-led company had made steady progress advancing the vehicle’s capabilities.

While the top section of the rocket was lost, SpaceX succeeded in another complicated maneuver, bringing the spacecraft’s Super Heavy lower portion back down to Earth and catching it in midair using giant mechanical arms.

The largest and most powerful rocket ever built lifted off the launchpad at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Texas at 4:37 p.m. local time on Thursday. It was supposed to attempt to reach near orbital speeds and deploy 10 dummy spacecraft, designed to mimic the size, shape and weight of the upgraded SpaceX Starlink satellites that Starship will be launching in the future. 

It was to be the first time Starship attempted to deploy cargo in space, an important milestone in readying the rocket for operational use. 

But a little under eight and a half minutes into the mission, SpaceX lost communications with Starship. Launch commentators then said the vehicle had been “lost.”

Thursday’s mission marked the shortest Starship test flight since November 2023, when SpaceX lost the vehicle about eight minutes into its second launch ever. The apparent explosion was an unexpected turn after SpaceX had repeatedly made progress with its Starship test flights, pushing the vehicle further with each new launch attempt.

SpaceX will go through the flight data to determine what went wrong, launch webcast host Dan Huot told viewers.   

“It’s going to take some time in the next hours, days,” Huot said. “We’re going to figure out exactly what happened. Come back, fly the next one.” 

About six minutes into the flight, SpaceX used giant mechanical arms to “catch” the rocket’s Super Heavy booster — the same stunning engineering maneuver it completed during the rocket’s fifth test flight in October.

Recovering Super Heavy is critical to the developmental progress of the vehicle, which Musk has long touted will be fully reusable. 

SpaceX successfully caught a Starship rocket booster at the Starbase facility near Boca Chica Beach in Texas on Oct. 13.

During the rocket’s sixth test flight on Nov. 19, attended by President-elect Donald Trump, SpaceX skipped the booster catch, citing technical issues. 

Subscribe to Business of Space: The inside stories of investments beyond Earth, from satellite networks to moon landings. Delivered weekly.

The loss of Starship came just hours after Blue Origin LLC’s New Glenn rocket successfully reached orbit during its debut flight. The Jeff Bezos-backed firm is vying to challenge SpaceX’s ironclad grip on the launch market. Musk was quick to offer his fellow billionaire congratulations on reaching a new milestone.  

In the past, some of Starship’s launches have ended with explosions and other damage to the vehicle — emblems of SpaceX’s fly-fail-fix iterative approach to engineering. SpaceX said that for this launch, it upgraded the rocket’s heat shield — designed to cushion the extreme heat and forces as it plunges through the atmosphere. 

Other upgrades to the vehicle include a redesigned propulsion system, more powerful flight computer and additional cameras for flight monitoring, according to the company. 

(Updates with SpaceX comment in eighth paragraph.)

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com