- SpaceX’s Starship spun out of control and fell out of contact just as it reached space Thursday.
- Starship was supposed to deploy mock Starlink satellites and test its structural limits during reentry.
- It’s not yet clear where debris might fall or how much this incident will set back Elon Musk’s plans.
SpaceX’s Starship lost control and started spinning wildly just as it reached space on Thursday, taking Elon Musk’s biggest ambitions one step back.
“Unfortunately it seems we lost the attitude control on the ship,” Kate Tice, a webcast host and the senior manager of quality systems engineering at SpaceX, said after the ship began to visibly roll on SpaceX’s X livestream.
Starship was only about 20 seconds away from cutting off its engines, which is a major milestone it has passed on multiple flights and is basically the last step of getting itself into space.
“We did lose contact with the ship,” Dan Huot, the other SpaceX webcast host, said.
Some of the ship’s engines went out early before it started to spin, Huot said.
“We have some more to learn about this vehicle,” Huot said.
It’s not yet clear what happened, whether the ship exploded, or where its debris might fall.
“We’ve got some practice at this now,” Huot said. “We’ve got a lot of measures in place like debris-response areas where we coordinate very closely with air-traffic control. We have a lot of measures put before we ever launch a rocket to make sure that we’re keeping the public safe. Those worked last time and they’re actively in work right now.”
The incident comes just a month after a Starship exploded and rained down huge chunks of debris in the Caribbean, causing the Federal Aviation Administration to divert aircraft in the area and triggering an investigation.
SpaceX made upgrades to avoid the fuel leaks and fire in the ship’s “attic area” which it pinpointed as the cause of the explosion. The company got reapproval from the FAA and flew again Thursday, only to lose Starship again.
The future of SpaceX and the space industry at large is on the line.
The Starship-Super Heavy launch system — consisting of the lower-stage Super Heavy booster and upper-stage Starship rocket — promises to be the largest, most powerful, and first-ever fully reusable orbital rocket on Earth.
SpaceX via X
Its prowess could help cut the cost of spaceflight by an order of magnitude, but not anytime soon if SpaceX can’t keep Starship in one piece.
Starship has previously flown to space successfully, landed in the ocean with its engines firing, and seen its Super Heavy booster return to Earth and lower itself into a pair of chopstick-like arms on a landing tower.
Those demonstrations were all promising for SpaceX’s plans to recover and reuse both Starship and the Super Heavy booster. SpaceX had hoped Thursday’s flight would take things a step further.
The flight had two primary goals: to deploy its first payload of mock Starlink satellites in space and to run experiments in Starship’s reentry and descent to Earth. It never got the chance.
The flight was intended to test the limits of Starship’s structure on its return to Earth, with some of its protective tiles removed from vulnerable areas for stress testing. By contrast, for the ascent to space, SpaceX had made upgrades to fortify Starship.
Musk founded the company in 2002 with the goal of bringing humans to Mars. Starship is the vehicle that’s supposed to make that happen.
Musk has said that, in addition to hauling astronauts and materials to the moon and conducting rapid point-to-point transport on Earth, Starship could carry 1 million people to Mars, along with all the necessary cargo for them to build a city there.
