SpaceX Starship Test Flight Ends Early But Major Milestones Were Accomplished
Keith’s note: The second flight of a Starship/Heavy Booster began on time today at 8:00 am EST. The rocket performed nominally up to and during “hot staging”. Moments after the separation of the Heavy Booster and Starship the first stage blew up. The Second stage – Starship – continued on a nominal ascent until just before the point at which it would have normally shut down its engines. And all data stopped. SpaceX said on its webcast “No more data from second stage so we think we may have lost it” followed by “Apparently flight termination system may have activated late in ascent over the Gulf of Mexico”. SpaceX then terminated its olive webcast. So, i summary, they had 33 engines on the first stage all the way up to staging, did a clean separation, lost the first stage, sent the second stage almost all the way and then lost that to. Again this was a test flight and they got much further along than they did on the first test flight. Its rocket science folks. Update: I appeared on Deutsche Welle TV this morning to discuss the flight test [Audio]
One response to “SpaceX Starship Test Flight Ends Early But Major Milestones Were Accomplished”
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Gorgeous images! That second, up-nozzle still-image of the booster, showing all 32 engines beautifully lit, looks like a glowing white chrysanthemum* flower! And the image following with the light reflecting off the plume effects makes it appear Starship is entering a cavernous wormhole. As for the follow-on burst image, I’d prefer to describe it as Starship having successfully gone to visit the Bajoran Prophets.
I heard mixed media messages on this test, with several mini-news-biters just saying another Elon super rocket blew up again! But many more outlets did some justice explaining the upper-stage did carry on for several minutes before it was lost as well (and even with the losses, some very big milestones were still met). I watched this… four minutes of upper-stage engine burn seemed a good long time to my eyes, and I didn’t really see it (from ground cam) just “blow up” (oh, it certainly could have, but LOS could have been anything)
I really believe third time will be the charmer (or at least take it into the pacific reentry phase… if another RUD, we’ll then say fourth time’s the charmer)
* – Yeah, I admit I had to check-spell that name several times!