SpaceX’s seventh Starship test flight had some major ups and downs.
The company launched its Starship megarocket for the seventh time today (Jan. 16), sending the 403.5-foot-tall (123-meter) reusable vehicle into the air from its Starbase site in South Texas at 5:37 p.m. EST (22:37 GMT; 4 17:37 local time).
One of the goals of this ambitious test flight was to catch Starship’s giant first stage booster, known as Super Heavy, from the Starbase launch tower, using the Starship’s “wand” arms. structure. SpaceX achieved this for the first time during the Starship 5 flight in October – and did it again today.
The 33-engine booster nestled gently into the tower’s arms about seven minutes after liftoff today, demonstrating the time-saving recovery strategy that SpaceX intends to use for both the Super Heavy and the Ship, the spaceship measuring 52 meters high. upper floor.
Related: Starship and Super Heavy explained
But everything didn’t go as planned today. SpaceX lost contact with the craft about 8.5 minutes into the flight, apparently after the vehicle experienced some sort of anomaly.
All six of the Ship’s Raptor’s engines ignited during the stage’s ramp-up, “but as we got to the end of that climb, we saw the engines fail on the telemetry, and we have since lost the contact with the ship,” Dan Huot of SpaceX’s communications team said during the company’s launch webcast.
Huot and fellow webcast host Kate Tice later confirmed the ship had been lost. The reasons were not immediately clear, both men said.
The ship was supposed to travel around much of the world, then gently splash down in the Indian Ocean off the west coast of Australia about 66 minutes after liftoff, as it did on Starship’s three previous launches.
Flight 7 was supposed to also feature something new for Ship: About 17.5 minutes after liftoff, the upper stage was to deploy 10 simulated satellites similar in size and weight to the next-generation version of the Starlink broadband spacecraft from SpaceX. However, the ship did not reach such a distance in flight.
Deployment would have been a useful practice. SpaceX is counting on Starship to complete construction of its Starlink megaconstellation, which currently has nearly 7,000 satellites in low Earth orbit but could ultimately house more than 40,000 craft.
The dummy satellites were to follow the ship’s suborbital trajectory, eventually crashing into the Indian Ocean, SpaceX wrote in a description of Flight 7’s mission.
As Huot and Tice noted, the upper stage of the ship flying today was a new iteration that featured a series of improvements and modifications.
“The vehicle’s front flaps were reduced in size and moved toward the tip of the vehicle and away from the heat shield, significantly reducing their exposure to reentry heating while simplifying the underlying mechanisms and protective tiling,” SpaceX wrote in the mission description.
“Propulsion system redesigns, including a 25% increase in propellant volume, vacuum coating of the fuel lines, a new fuel line system for the vehicle’s Raptor vacuum engines and a Improved propulsion avionics module controlling vehicle valves and readout sensors, all add additional vehicle performance and the ability to perform longer missions,” the company added.
These modifications added about 6.5 feet to the length of the vehicle, according to SpaceX.
The Super Heavy that flew today was largely the same as recent boosters, but it had one new twist. In a first for Super Heavy, he used used equipment – a Raptor engine that also flew on Flight 5.
Starship’s previous six test flights took place in April and November 2023 and March, June, October and November last year. SpaceX aimed to capture Super Heavies with wands Vol 6 also, but a communication problem with the launch tower canceled this attempt and the booster was diverted for a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
SpaceX is developing Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, to help humanity colonize the Moon and Mars, among other feats. And we should expect to see more than just a handful of Starship test flights this year; the company aims to make serious progress on the vehicle in 2025.
“This new year will be a transformation for Starship, with the goal of repurposing the entire online system and carrying out increasingly ambitious missions as we progress toward being able to send humans and cargo into Earth orbit, the Moon and Mars,” SpaceX wrote in the Flight 7 mission description.