SpaceX Starship became uncontrollable in space during a test flight Thursday, marking the second consecutive launch that the vehicle encountered a deadly problem on its way to the orbit.
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) briefly interrupted flights to the main airports in Florida and seems to have diverted Some others for caution of “spatial launch debris”. The agency told Techcrunch that it forces SpaceX to carry out what is called an investigation into mishaps on failure.
The company launched Starship using its super heavy booster and things seemed normal during the first eight minutes of the flight. The ship has successfully separated and headed for space, while the booster returned to the launch of the company in Texas, where it was caught For a third time by the launch tower.
But about eight minutes and nine seconds after the flight start, the SpaceX broadcasting graphics showed that Starship loses several raptor engines on the vehicle. On -board images have shown that the ship started spiral on the ocean.
“We have just seen engines come out, it seems that we lose control of the attitude of the ship,” said SpaceX communications director Dan Huot, on the broadcast. “At this point, we have lost contact with the ship.”
Images Published on social networks has shown that the ship was separating from the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic A A few minutes later. Business poster to X that he “immediately started coordination with security managers to implement pre-plane responses”.
High -level consecutive explosions have come while SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk, has spent the last few weeks causing chaos through the American federal government with its government ministry. This included the deployment of FAA employees, which oversees SpaceX flights.
SpaceX hoped to deploy four fake versions of its Starlink satellites during Thursday’s test flight, one step towards the objective of using Starship for commercial missions. The company has deliberately developed starship by making test flights in rapid succession and learning things that go both both well and bad.
But Thursday’s failure comes only a few weeks after the seventh test flight, which saw Starship broke spectacularly on the Turks & Caicos islands, which made FAA divert a certain number of flights in this aerial space.
SpaceX has investigated the misadventures on this failure. The company determined that the propellant was fleeing inside Starship, which caused fires and a communication failure with the ship before it self-lifted.
Before this test flight, SpaceX said it had made improvements to lines that send fuel to starship engines and changed the temperature of the propellant. He also added additional vents and “a new purge system” to better cover himself against any leak.
On some of his previous test flights, SpaceX saw his ship break as he was trying to enter the earth’s atmosphere. The company has deployed changes on the seventh test flight which were supposed to help it learn to better prepare the ship to survive this school year.
“With flight 8, we focus on finding the actual limits of the starship so that we can prepare to finally return to the launch site and catch it”, the company wrote On X Thursday.
This story has been updated with FAA’s response.
