As you may recall, Space X’s test launches #7 and #8 both ended in the destruction of the ship over the Caribbean, which was a disappointment.
In flights seven and eight, both explosions occurred at about the same point in the flight, just before the second-stage engines cut off. But the causes were “distinctly different,” SpaceX said in an update last week.
For the seventh flight, SpaceX said that the probable cause was stronger than expected rhythmic oscillations. The vibrations caused leaks of propellant that caught fire.
Fixes intended to damp the vibrations worked during the eighth flight, SpaceX said.
However, during the eighth flight, a flash was seen near the bottom of the second-stage vehicle near one of the center engines. That engine then failed. Three other engines then shut down, and SpaceX lost control of the vehicle about nine and a half minutes after launch.
Today, the company launched test flight #9 and this one was a mixed bag though more successful than the last two flights. There were some initial successes but ultimately neither the ship nor the booster were able to land as hoped.
The big success today was the reuse of the booster from test flight #7. Of course Space X has been reusing boosters on its Falcon 9 rockets for years now, and two other companies have achieved this as well. But the size of Starship is much greater (around 400 ft.) and it lacks any landing gear. Instead it gets caught out of the air by Mechazilla, the launch tower with it’s giant arms.
So the liftoff today went well and the reusable booster didn’t lose any engines during the boost phase. Next there was a new maneuver at stage separation designed to flip the booster quickly in the right direction to return. That also worked and all six of the ship’s engines were working.
The plan for this flight was never to try for a catch of the booster. Instead, Space X wanted to try a new more aggressive reentry to see how that would affect the booster and then try to “land” it in the Gulf where it would splash into the water in a controlled way. The engines did relight to slow it down but then they lost contact.
SpaceX put the booster through its paces. Only 13 engines were reignited just before landing. That included just two of the vehicle’s three center engines, an intentional malfunction meant to show engineers how the vehicle will behave in less-than-ideal situations.
Even before attempting this landing maneuver, SpaceX did not expect a super-controlled ending. And SpaceX’s Dan Huot said SpaceX lost contact with the vehicle shortly before touchdown and confirmed the Super Heavy had met its “demise.”
“We’ve done this in computer modeling. It shows that sometimes the control isn’t great, but only one way to really prove it out and that’s to get real world data,” Huot said.
Meanwhile, the ship seemed to be operating as planned for about 25-minutes. Once again, as with the previous test flights, the plan was to bring it in for a controlled water landing over the Indian Ocean. And before that, the plan was to test the deployment of some dummy Starlink satellites. Unfortunately, the narrow door that would have allowed the ejection of those satellites got stuck so there was no test of that system.
Things went from bad to worse when the ground station lost attitude control of the ship and it began to spin wildly.
SpaceX’s Dan Huot just announced that Starship has lost attitude control. That means the vehicle won’t be able to precisely orient itself for reentry, or the stage of flight in which the vehicle dives back into the planet’s thick inner atmosphere…
The spacecraft “did spring a leak in some of the fuel tank systems inside of Starship,” Huot said of what caused the loss of control. “This lowers the chances for it to be a controlled reentry.”
After a few minutes they essentially gave up on regaining control of the ship and vented off the excess propellant to prevent it from causing an explosion. As the ship dropped back toward earth, it began to heat up as the atmosphere became more dense. Video relayed from the ship via Starlink satellites would cut in and out. One of the last visuals I saw was of one of the stabilizers on the front of the ship melting from the heat.
So not an unqualified success but they did have a success with the reuse of the booster and the ship lasted a lot longer than it did on the previous two flights. This is how Space X works. They move quickly, break things and then move on to the next problem. The next booster and the next ship for test flight #10 are already built and could be ready to go as soon as next month.
Here’s the full video of the launch. You can skip ahead to about 45 minutes to the liftoff.
Watch Starship’s ninth flight test → https://t.co/Gufroc2kUz https://t.co/NYF0ZMyeGp
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 23, 2025
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