SpaceX’s spacecraft marked its second launch, when it got out of control while in space during a test flight on Thursday, causing the vehicle to fall into fatal trouble on its way into orbit.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) appears to have temporarily suspended flights to major Florida airports, diverting several others from the attention of “space-launched debris.” The agency told TechCrunch that SpaceX is requesting that it perform what is known as a failed accident investigation.
The company launched Starship using a super heavy booster, and the first eight minutes of the flight looked normal. The ship successfully separated and headed for space, but the booster returned to the launchpad of a company in Texas, where he was caught for the third time at the launch tower.
However, in about 8 minutes and 9 seconds of the flight, SpaceX’s broadcast graphics showed Starship losing multiple Raptor engines in the vehicle. Images on the ship show that the ship began to spiral over the edge above the sea.
“We’ve just seen some engines go outside and it looks like we’re losing control of the ship’s attitude,” SpaceX Communications Manager Dan Huott said on the broadcast. “At this point we lost contact with the ship.”
Video posted on social media showed the ship was broken across the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic minutes later. The company posted to X, “We immediately began coordinating with safety personnel to implement a pre-planned emergency response.”
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has spent the past few weeks causing chaos across the government-efficient US federal government, causing a high-profile back-to-back explosion. That included his deployment of employees to the FAA and overseeing SpaceX flights.
SpaceX was hoping to deploy four dummy versions of the Starlink satellite during its test flight on Thursday. This is a step towards the goal of using Starship for commercial missions. The company intentionally develops spacecraft by doing test flights quickly and consecutively and learning from both the right and wrong things.
But Thursday’s failure comes just weeks after the seventh test flight. This led to the starry sky parting in a spectacular way on the islands of Turks and Caicos, with the FAA deflecting many flights in its airspace.
SpaceX conducted a disaster investigation into its failure. The company determined that the propeller was leaking into the spacecraft, causing a power outage of communication between the fire and the ship before it could self-destruct.
Prior to this test flight, SpaceX said it had improved the line of fueling the Starship engine and changed the temperature of the propellant. We also added extra vents and a “new purge system” to better hedge the hedge against leaks.
On some of the previous test flights, SpaceX tried to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere, causing the spacecraft to disband. The company deployed the changes on its seventh test flight. This was supposed to help us learn how to better prepare the ship to survive that re-entry.
“Flight 8 focuses on finding real-world restrictions on spacecraft, so you’ll finally be ready to return the spacecraft to the launch site and catch it,” he wrote to X on Thursday.
This story was updated in a response from the FAA.
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