After two potentially dangerous failures and a couple of nerve-wracking scrubs, Tuesday’s test of the Starship system went off without a hitch. The massive rocket system launched from Starbase City about 6:30 p.m. local time and reached orbit. Previous tests have ended with an explosion during staging, scattering debris and closing airspace across the Caribbean. The purpose of the flight was to test a reusable heat shield for the reentry of the Starship spacecraft. The heat shield held as the spacecraft settled to a soft landing in the Indian Ocean where it was intentionally obliterated in an explosion.
The flight was not quite flawless. SpaceX reported there was some minor damage. “Partial structural failure of aft skirt at T+47m, some minor flap damage but overall a good flight putting the program back on track,” SpaceX said in an X post. Other milestones on the flight included a test of an engine reconfiguration on the booster in case of a failure during recapture on the launch pad. That test had to be done over water for safety, so the huge rocket blew up in the Gulf after the successful test.
What stupendous achievements we witness!
Great stuff! Glad to see such a productive test.
Wow! Great video. It does indeed get hot and violent on reentry. Nice to see the various components react.
It “landed” in the Indian Ocean, no?
Did what it was programmed to do…wasn’t an anomaly, was planned.
Its simulated landing meant slowing to landing speed at some specific point just above the ocean – and then dropping from there.
Article copy says Gulf… but it was Indian Ocean I think.
I watched the whole thing–amazing! I read on one site that the explosion after splashdown was not planned, but here I read that it was?
I think once you plop a hot rocket motor into the drink, all bets are off. No one can really predict if it’ll blow up or not.
They would like for it to remain intact, but something that big falling over – very unlikely. Not designed to survive a topple.
Flight-6 Starship broke apart after splashdown, but did not explode like this one did. They were able to recover some parts for examination.
The booster engines was deliberately cut-off when the booster was at about 200feet. The purpose was to destroy the large booster and let it sink, rather than having to recover it if has floated after a gentle water touchdown.
Spectacular! I just wish they didn’t have to destroy it given that it made it back almost in one piece. So much stuff inside that could help with posy flight analysis.
Nice to read about something uplifting (no pun).
Seems like there are a few aspects you’d like to know that aren’t available on the rather comprehensive telemetry downlink. Guess I’d be wondering about erosion inside the rocket motors. But then, that’s something you can characterize pretty well in ground testing.
**POST flight analysis
The best part of this launch broadcast was seeing the pizza dispenser that released the Starlink Demosats from the Starship spacecraft.
Always amazes me to see control fin parts melting away during reentry.
Really great test flight, from liftoff, to orbit, watching the in-orbit launch of Starlink modules, then the landing in the Indian Ocean. Truly phenomenal work by all the SpaceX team.
I doubt most people realize how amazing SpaceX accomplishments truly are. I’m old enough to remember the infancy of NASA, watching all their failures, test rockets exploding on the launch pad, rockets falling over before launch and others going totally out of control shortly after lift-off. And, SpaceX is routinely doing what no other country, space agency, or space company is doing.
Absolutely phenomenal work SpaceX.
Actually, turns out there WAS an in-flight explosion, not just when the hot engines hit the water. Run the video above to the ~2:30 mark. There’s some sort of explosion (SpaceX terms it an “energetic event”) in the skirt on the right side. They just show a brief glimpse of it in the video, but in one of the stills of the vehicle setting down in the ocean, you can see a blasted area near the aft fin on the left side. Friend of mine speculated that a LOX line blew. There’s speculation that the “event” may have partially crippled one of the fins.
Still, kudos to the designers. The ship set down almost normally despite the problem.
Can’t post images here (yet) but I put a picture on my web page:
http://www.wanttaja.com/starship.jpg