Elon Musk vows more Starship launches despite latest flight test failure
Elon Musk has promised one Starship launch 'every three to four weeks' after his vision for sending humans to the moon and Mars suffered a fresh setback with the fiery loss of another mega-rocket prototype high above Earth.
What was intended to be a 56-minute sub-orbital test flight from Texas to a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean ended in fireworks after a propellant leak caused the spacecraft to spin out of control and re-enter the atmosphere as a blazing shower of debris.
'As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly,' the company stated, using a corporate euphemism for 'catastrophic break-up'.
It added: 'Teams will continue to review data and work toward our next flight test. 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 multiplanetary.'
It was the third out of three test flights to be lost this year and the ninth flight overall of the fully-stacked Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster — the world's most powerful rocket.
It was also the first time Starship has flown with a recycled booster, which launched the ship successfully from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, before separating as scheduled but then exploding during its descent.
The upper stage vehicle flew on, streaking east through the Caribbean, across the Atlantic Ocean and over southern Africa at a peak speed of 26,316mph, appearing as an orange ball streaking across the night sky.
Engineers watching from the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, California, whooped in celebration as it checked off mission milestones such as lighting all its engines to reach its planned trajectory, but groaned as it failed others, including being unable to deploy a batch of simulated Starlink satellites when the payload door jammed.
'We're trying to do something that's impossibly hard and we're not going to reach it in a straight line; there's going to be bumps, there's going to be turns,' said Dan Huot, SpaceX's communications manager.
SpaceX intends to execute up to 25 flight tests this year as Musk seeks to deliver on his declared goal of sending the first Starship to Mars next year, carrying Optimus, a robotic humanoid passenger.
Vast technological challenges have yet to be resolved, however, before such a mission could stand a chance of success.
Nasa, the US space agency, is banking on SpaceX having a version of Starship ready for landing humans on the moon as part of the Artemis III lunar mission. The mission is officially targeted for late 2026, though the timeline is certain to slip as both the US space agency and SpaceX struggle against an overly ambitious timeline.
SpaceX operates an engineering methodology of 'rapid iterative design' — building a prototype fast and relatively cheaply, pressing it into action, then using the lessons learned to improve the next one and repeat the cycle.
It is an unconventional approach that comes with a higher expectation of failure as SpaceX pushes hardware to its limits to get the data it needs.
The last two test flights in January and March terminated before they had reached those limits due to propellant leaks and engine fires — problems that Musk said hours before Tuesday's flight test that he was '80 per cent' hopeful had been fixed.
He was eager for this flight to be all about testing the heat shield, which is comprised of silica-based ceramic composites designed to withstand the temperatures of more than 1,400C generated during the spacecraft's re-entry through Earth's atmosphere.
'Starship made it to the scheduled ship engine cutoff, so big improvement over last flight! Also, no significant loss of heat shield tiles during ascent. Leaks caused loss of main tank pressure during the coast and re-entry phase. Lot of good data to review. Launch cadence for next three flights will be faster, at approximately one every three to four weeks,' Musk posted on X on Wednesday.
Jessie Anderson, a senior engineering manager at SpaceX, said: 'This is the SpaceX way … we're going to learn and iterate, and iterate over and over again 'til we iron it out.'
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