SpaceX launched its Starship megarocket for the ninth time ever today (May 27), on a bold test flight that featured the first-ever significant reuse of Starship hardware.
Starship’s two stages separated as planned on Flight 9, and the upper stage even reached space, which was an improvement over the giant vehicle’s most recent two flights. But SpaceX ended up losing both stages before they could accomplish their full flight goals.
“Starship made it to the scheduled ship engine cutoff, so big improvement over last flight!” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on social media after the flight. “Leaks caused loss of main tank pressure during the coast and re-entry phase. Lot of good data to review.” Musk said the next three Starship test launches could lift off every three to four weeks in the days ahead.
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SpaceX is developing Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, among other tasks.
The vehicle’s two stages are a giant booster called Super Heavy and a 171-foot-tall (52 meters) upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship, or simply “Ship.” Both are designed to be fully and rapidly rapidly reusable, and both are powered by SpaceX’s new Raptor engine — 33 of them for Super Heavy and six for Ship.
Before today, a fully stacked Starship had lifted off eight times, on each occasion from SpaceX’s Starbase site in South Texas (which recently became the Lone Star State’s newest city). Two of those flights occurred this year — on Jan. 16 and March 6. Both had similar mixed outcomes.
“We are trying to do something that is impossibly hard,” Dan Huot, of SpaceX’s communications team, said during the Flight 9 webcast today.
“You’re not going to reach it in a it in a straight line,” he added. “We’ve said there’s going to be bumps, there’s going to be turns. But seeing that ship in space today was a hell of a moment for us, so congratulations to every single person who put time, effort, sweat, anything, into that rocket.”
On Flight 7 and Flight 8, Super Heavy performed flawlessly, acing its engine burn and then returning to Starbase for a catch by the launch tower’s “chopstick” arms. But Ship had problems: It exploded less than 10 minutes after launch on both missions, raining debris down on the Turks and Caicos Islands and The Bahamas, respectively.
Though the two Ship failures occurred at similar times during flight, they had different root causes, according to SpaceX. A powerful “harmonic response” likely led to propellant leaks on Flight 7, whereas a hardware failure in a Raptor engine was responsible for the Flight 8 fireworks, the company determined.
SpaceX took pains to minimize the chances that such issues would crop up on future flights, making significant hardware changes and conducting a number of engine trials on the ground in Texas. Flight 9 put such work to the test — and it broke new ground as well.
The mission lifted off from Starbase today at 7:37 p.m. EDT (2337 GMT; 6:37 p.m. local Texas time), sending the 40-story-tall rocket into the Texas sky atop a pillar of flame.
It was a milestone launch, marking the first-ever reuse of a Super Heavy booster; this one earned its wings on Flight 7 in January. (SpaceX swapped out just four of its Raptors after that mission, meaning that 29 of the engines that flew today were flight-proven.)
“Lessons learned from the first booster refurbishment and subsequent performance in flight will enable faster turnarounds of future reflights as progress is made towards vehicles requiring no hands-on maintenance between launches,” the company wrote in a Flight 9 mission preview.
The Super Heavy had a somewhat different job to do today; it conducted a variety of experiments on its way back down to Earth. For example, the booster performed a controlled rather than randomized return flip and hit the atmosphere at a different angle.
“By increasing the amount of atmospheric drag on the vehicle, a higher angle of attack can result in a lower descent speed, which in turn requires less propellant for the initial landing burn,” SpaceX wrote in the mission preview. “Getting real-world data on how the booster is able to control its flight at this higher angle of attack will contribute to improved performance on future vehicles, including the next generation of Super Heavy.”
These experiments complicated Super Heavy’s flight profile compared to previous missions, making another “chopsticks” catch at Starbase a tougher proposition. So, rather than risk damaging the launch tower and other infrastructure, SpaceX decided to bring the booster back for a “hard splashdown” in the Gulf of Mexico on Flight 9.
That was the plan, anyway; Super Heavy didn’t quite make it that far. The booster broke apart about 6 minutes and 20 seconds into today’s flight, just after beginning its landing burn.
“Confirmation that the booster did demise,” Huot said during the Flight 9 webcast. Super Heavy’s flight ended “before it was able to get through landing burn,” he added.
Ship, by contrast, improved its performance a bit this time around. It reached space today on a suborbital trajectory that took it eastward over the Atlantic Ocean — the same basic path the vehicle took on the truncated Flight 7 and Flight 8.
But Flight 9 got choppy for Ship after that. The vehicle was supposed to deploy eight dummy versions of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites about 18.5 minutes after liftoff, which would have been a landmark first for the Starship program. That didn’t happen, however; the payload door couldn’t open fully, so SpaceX abandoned the deployment try.
Then, about 30 minutes after launch, Ship started to tumble, which was the result of a leak in Ship’s fuel-tank systems, according to Huot.
“A lot of those [tanks] are used for your attitude control,” he said. “And so, at this point, we’ve essentially lost our attitude control with Starship.”
As a result, SpaceX nixed a plan to relight one of Ship’s Raptor engines in space, a test that was supposed to happen about 38 minutes after launch. And the company gave up hope of a soft splashdown for the vehicle, instead becoming resigned to a breakup over the Indian Ocean during Ship’s reentry.
The company therefore will not get all the data it wanted about Flight 9. And there was quite a bit to get; for example, SpaceX removed some of Ship’s heat-shield tiles to stress-test vulnerable areas, and it also tried out several different tile materials, including one with an active cooling system.
But the company plans to bounce back and try again soon, just as it did after Flight 7 and Flight 8.
“This is exactly the SpaceX way,” Jessie Anderson, SpaceX manufacturing engineering manager, said during the Flight 9 webcast. “We’re going to learn, iterate, and iterate over and over again until we figure it out.”
Editor’s note: This story was updated at 9:20 p.m. ET on May 27 to include comments from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. It was updated at 8:27 p.m. ET with news of Ship’s loss of attitude control and presumed demise over the Indian Ocean.