his Thursday, SpaceX launched the upper stage of the Super Heavy booster into space as part of the seventh test flight scheduled for the starship. This seventh
SpaceX launch was planned to take place in Boca Chica, Texas, and seemed to run normally until Elon Musk’s SpaceX company lost communications with the spacecraft that was mounted above the Super Heavy booster after a safe starship catch.
So, the SpaceX Starship launch started successfully, with the spacecraft separated from the booster and ascending to orbit when a rocket engine faced some issues. The SpaceX company then lost the telemetry connection with the spacecraft and confirmed a few minutes later that the upper stage faced some abnormalities during the final moments of its ascent burn.
“It successfully separated from the Super Heavy booster, but during that ascent phase, a couple of the engines dropped out, and then shortly thereafter, we lost communication with the vehicle. We are assuming that we have lost the ship.”, Kate Tice from SpaceX stated during the live stream.
According to the CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk on its X account, the Super Heavy booster is most likely to have gathered too much pressure inside the cavity, which caused this Starship SpaceX issue. He also stated that the company had made progress in solving this problem and added an additional suppression system along with an increased venting area in order to avoid any issues in the next SpaceX Starship launches scheduled.
Subscribe to our newsletter
But quickly after the Starship SpaceX faced some challenges, various users on different social media platforms shared photos and videos with what seemed to be pieces and debris of the spacecraft burning in their way to re-enter the planet's atmosphere.
It should be mentioned that despite these issues, the SpaceX Starship had significant performance improvements compared with the previous SpaceX Starship launch. Also, the spacecraft featured a redesigned propulsion system and an enhanced computer system, contributing to these better performances. Even the Super Heavy booster made history today due to the fact that was the first one which reused a Raptor engine from the previous SpaceX launch test.
Before the SpaceX launch the company stated that the Super Heavy booster has “a significant number of tiles will be removed to stress-test vulnerable areas across the vehicle,”. Even though this improvement seemed to be the actual cause of the incident, we don't know for sure if it was indeed a significant aspect of its destruction.
