SpaceX launched its Starship megarocket for the ninth time ever today (May 27), on a bold test flight that featured the first-ever significant reuse of Starship hardware.
Starship‘s two stages separated as planned on Flight 9, and the upper stage even reached space, which was an improvement over the giant vehicle’s most recent two flights. But SpaceX ended up losing both stages before they could accomplish their full flight goals.
“Starship made it to the scheduled ship engine cutoff, so big improvement over last flight!” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on social media after the flight. “Leaks caused loss of main tank pressure during the coast and re-entry phase. Lot of good data to review.” Musk said the next three Starship test launches could lift off every three to four weeks in the days ahead.
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SpaceX is developing Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, among other tasks.
The vehicle’s two stages are a giant booster called Super Heavy and a 171-foot-tall (52 meters) upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship, or simply “Ship.” Both are designed to be fully and rapidly rapidly reusable, and both are powered by SpaceX’s new Raptor engine — 33 of them for Super Heavy and six for Ship.
Before today, a fully stacked Starship had lifted off eight times, on each occasion from SpaceX’s Starbase site in South Texas (which recently became the Lone Star State’s newest city). Two of those flights occurred this year — on Jan. 16 and March 6. Both had similar mixed outcomes.
“We are trying to do something that is impossibly hard,” Dan Huot, of SpaceX’s communications team, said during the Flight 9 webcast today.
“You’re not going to reach it in a it in a straight line,” he added. “We’ve said there’s going to be bumps, there’s going to be turns. But seeing that ship in space today was a hell of a moment for us, so congratulations to every single person who put time, effort, sweat, anything, into that rocket.”
On Flight 7 and Flight 8, Super Heavy performed flawlessly, acing its engine burn and then returning to Starbase for a catch by the…
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