SpaceX caught the Starship rocket’s Super Heavy booster for a second time, after it launched the upper stage into space on Thursday during a seventh test flight of the system. Soon after the successful catch, SpaceX representatives reported the ship was lost after the company lost contact about eight and half minutes into the flight.
The ship had successfully separated from the booster and had started its own rocket engines to ascend to orbit before it appeared some of those engines gave out. The company then saw its link to the telemetry coming off of the ship disappear, and a few minutes later SpaceX confirmed that the ship had suffered an “anomaly with that upper stage” during the end of its ascent burn in space.
After the live stream ended, SpaceX wrote on X that Starship “experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn” and said that it was still working to understand the root cause.
Shortly after the ship failed, users across social media shared photos and videos of what appeared to be pieces of the spacecraft burning up as they re-entered Earth’s atmosphere over Turks and Caicos. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shared one of the videos on Xwriting: “Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed!”
It also appears that a number of flights were diverted in the area at around the same time as the debris was spotted, according to data from Flightradar24. The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement to Read that it “is aware an anomaly occurred during the SpaceX Starship Flight 7 mission that launched from Boca Chica, Texas, on Jan. 16,” and that it is “assessing the operation and will issue an updated statement.”
The company pulled off the first booster “catch” — which involves articulated arms on the launch tower snatching the rocket stage out of the air as it uses rockets to slow its descent — in October 2024. A second attempt to catch the booster in November was called off due to a communication problem.
This launch was about much more than another catch, though. SpaceX had loaded Starship with 10 dummy Starlink satellites and was planning to attempt the first payload deployment with the spacecraft. The test was supposed to be the start of a “transformational” year for Starship, SpaceX said on its website.
The ship SpaceX sent up on Thursday was upgraded in multiple ways compared to prior test flights. SpaceX said this Starship’s avionics systems had a “complete redesign,” featuring a more powerful flight computer and integrated antennas with Starlink, GNSS, and backup RF communication functions.
The ship was fitted with redesigned inertial navigation and star tracking sensors, and integrated “smart batteries and power units” that SpaceX said distributed data and 2.7MW of power across the craft. This updated Starship also had more than 30 cameras on board so the company’s engineers could monitor the performance of all this new and existing hardware.
SpaceX is working towards being able to catch Starship along with the booster, and this flight was supposed to be a chance to test technologies that would make that possible. The company put a number of different heat tiles on the ship, to test which offer the best protection from the forces of re-entry. The ship also had “non-structural versions” of the knobs that get caught by the tower, to see how they would hold up during re-entry.
On the booster side of things, SpaceX had outfitted the launch tower with radar sensors to more accurately locate the rocket stage during the catch process. The booster was also re-using one of the rocket engines from a previous Starship flight for the first time.
This story has been updated with additional information from SpaceX, Elon Musk, and a comment from the FAA.
Comments are closed.