Starship could have gone boom on Saturday (Nov. 18), but there was rather a lot to love in regards to the giant vehicle’s second-ever test flight, SpaceX says.
The trial mission aimed to send Starship’s 165-foot-tall (50 meters) upper stage most of the best way around Earth, from SpaceX’s Starbase site in South Texas to a patch of the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.
That did not occur; the upper stage, generally known as Starship, exploded about eight minutes after launch, the identical fate that met the vehicle’s huge first stage, called Super Heavy, 4.5 minutes earlier. Still, the next-gen megarocket notched various essential milestones on Saturday, amongst them a smooth liftoff.
“All 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy Booster began up successfully and, for the primary time, accomplished a full-duration burn during ascent,” SpaceX wrote in a recent mission update.
Related: SpaceX’s 2nd Starship launch test looks amazing in these stunning photos and videos
Starship separated from Super Heavy successfully as well, via a way generally known as “hot staging.”
About 2.5 minutes into the flight, Super Heavy began “powering down all but three of Super Heavy’s Raptor engines and successfully igniting the six second-stage Raptor engines before separating the vehicles,” SpaceX wrote within the update. “This was the primary time this system has been done successfully with a vehicle of this size.”
(In “normal” staging, the upper-stage engines ignite after separation has already occurred.)
Super Heavy then performed a planned “flip maneuver” and a boostback engine burn, with the goal of steering itself to a water landing within the Gulf of Mexico. However the booster experienced a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” — SpaceX-speak for a breakup or explosion — about 3.5 minutes after launch.
The upper stage’s six Raptors, meanwhile, carried that vehicle to a maximum altitude of about 90 miles (150 kilometers) and a top speed of roughly 14,900 mph (24,000 kph), SpaceX wrote within the update. The upper stage nearly accomplished its planned full-duration burn, but not quite.
“The flight test’s conclusion got here when telemetry was lost near the tip of second-stage burn prior to engine cutoff after greater than eight minutes of flight,” SpaceX wrote within the update. “The team verified a secure command destruct was appropriately triggered based on available vehicle performance data.”
The update doesn’t provide a hypothesized cause for the telemetry loss.
Saturday’s numbers represent a marked improvement over the primary Starship test flight, which launched from Starbase on April 20 with similar goals.
A handful of Super Heavy’s Raptors conked out early during that debut flight, and the vehicle’s two stages didn’t separate as planned. SpaceX intentionally detonated the tumbling vehicle, which reached a maximum altitude of about 24 miles (39 km), about 4 minutes after liftoff.
That first flight caused significant damage to parts of Starbase, blasting out a giant crater beneath the location’s orbital launch mount. SpaceX installed a water-spewing steel plate beneath the mount ahead of the second flight to forestall such damage from recurring. That upgrade did the trick, because the launch mount made it through Saturday’s liftoff in fine condition, SpaceX wrote within the update.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is overseeing SpaceX’s investigation into what happened on Saturday. It’s unclear when that assessment will wrap up, and when the FAA will award one other launch license, but the corporate clearly desires to fly again soon.
“The team at Starbase is already working final preparations on the vehicles slated to be used in Starship’s third flight test, with Ship and Booster static fires coming up next,” SpaceX wrote within the update, referring to temporary tests that take a look at a vehicle’s engines within the leadup to launch.