SpaceX did some Progress in another test flight of the world’s most powerful rocket on Tuesday, ultimately overcame the technical issues that plagued the two launches that had plagued the program before it.
But a few minutes into the mission, SpaceX’s Starship lost control while cruising in space, and then nearly an hour after evacuating Texas’ Starbase from Starbase, Texas, the company was in a privately owned spaceport near the U.S.-Mexico border.
SpaceX’s next-generation rockets are designed to ultimately deliver cargo between Earth, Moon and Mars, as well as private and government crews. The Rockets are complex, huge, wider, longer than the Boeing 747 giant jet, and have been stable in the past two years since their first test in 2023, which is a setback for Starships.
In the two previous test flights of the Rocket (using an upgraded “2” Starship design), problems with the ship’s propulsion system resulted in leaks during launch, eventually triggering an early shutdown of the Rocket’s main engine. On both flights, the vehicle spins out of control and breaks, spreading debris around the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos.
The good news is that this didn’t happen Tuesday. The ship’s main engine lasted for a full duration, placing the vehicle on the expected trajectory, splashing towards the Indian Ocean. In a short time, the ship seemed to be on the successful flight.
“Starship hits the scheduled ship engine deadline, so it made a big improvement in the last flight! There was no significant loss of thermal insulation tiles,” wrote SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk.
The bad news is that Tuesday’s test flight revealed more issues, preventing SpaceX from achieving the most important targets of Musk’s overview launch.
Musk posted on X: “The leakage caused major tank pressure loss in the coast and reentry stages. A lot of review data.”
As the tank pressure is lost, the rocket begins to spin slowly on the black coast that has crossed more than 100 miles of space on Earth. The loss of runaway is spelled as another premature end point for the interstellar spacecraft test flight. Among the unmet goals of flight, most notable is SpaceX’s desire to study the performance of ship heat shields, which include improving the heat dissipation tiles to better withstand burnt odor temperatures reentering the atmosphere.
“The most important thing is data on how to improve the tile design, so basically data on the high heating, re-entering phase to improve the tile for the next iteration,” Musk told ARS Technica before Tuesday’s flight. “So we have more than a dozen or more tiles experiments. We are trying different paints on tiles. We are trying different manufacturing techniques, different attachment techniques. We are changing the gap fill for tiles.”
Engineers are eager to obtain data on changes to the heat shield, which cannot be fully tested on the ground. SpaceX officials hope that the new tiles will be more powerful than the first-generation flying tiles (or the 1st Starship version), allowing future ships to land and start quickly without time-consuming inspections, renovations, and in some cases, tiles replaced. This is the core tenet of SpaceX’s Starship program, which includes transporting astronauts to the surface of the moon, spreading low-Earth orbit with refueled tankers, and ultimately helping to establish settlements on Mars, all based on the rapid reusability of the Starship and its overweight boosters.
