SpaceX’s Starship rocket reaches space but is lost upon return to Earth

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SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket reached space on its longest test flight yet Thursday, but got lost on the final hurdle of its mission as it attempted to return to Earth.

After nearly an hour of near-flawless flight, passing several critical milestones to test the viability of the world’s largest rocket, Starship appears to have broken apart upon re-entry.

SpaceX mission control lost communications with Starship soon after it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, and engineers quickly confirmed that the Starship was lost.

This is the third loss of a spacecraft in less than 12 months after two previous test flights ended in explosions.

In a post on X, the Federal Aviation Administration said it would oversee an investigation into the “accident,” which “involved both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship vehicle.”

However, the test mission passed several critical milestones after launching from SpaceX’s Starbase spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas. The 120 meter tall spacecraft was able to open and close payload doors in space and transfer propellant from one fuel tank to another. The rocket’s Super Heavy Booster was also able to complete a rollover maneuver to begin its return to earth.

Approximately 49 minutes into the mission, the flight ended when telemetry signals were lost.

However, SpaceX hailed the test flight as a success. “We’re further away than we’ve ever been before,” SpaceX senior mechanical design engineer Dan Hewitt said in the company’s livestream just nine minutes into the flight, to deafening cheers from the crowd at headquarters in SpaceX in Hawthorne, California.

“What we achieved with this flight will provide valuable data to continue to rapidly develop Starship,” the company said in a statement on its website.

SpaceX plans to launch at least four more test rockets in the coming months. The test flight takes SpaceX one step closer to demonstrating its rocket technology and ability to carry payloads weighing 150 tons into orbit. NASA also relies on Starship to land humans on the Moon as part of the US space agency’s Artemis program.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk has said he wants to reduce launch costs to less than $10 million per flight with a reusable variant of Starship, substantially lower than those of the company’s smaller Falcon 9 rocket, which costs about $67 million. Millions of dollars. A report this year by consultancy Bain suggested that Starship could reduce the cost per kilogram of reaching low Earth orbit by 50 to 80 times.

Its vast capability is expected to accelerate the development of a commercial space economy, Bain said.

“It will enable the closing of more business cases for companies hoping to offer services in space – from communications and remote sensing satellite companies to commercial space stations, in-orbit manufacturing and asteroid mining operations,” the report said.

However, Starship could also undermine the business cases of the hundreds of start-ups launched globally in recent years, all of which hope to tap into growing demand for satellite services. Euroconsult, a space market consultancy, predicts that on average over 2,800 satellites will be launched per year between 2023 and 2032.

Musk announced plans for the superheavy rocket in 2012 to realize his ambition of carrying humans to Mars. When Starship finally took off for the first time in April last year, the mission malfunctioned. The rocket was deliberately destroyed by engineers after approximately four minutes of flight to avoid an uncontrolled landing.

The second test in November lasted long enough to take the rocket to the edge of space, but it too malfunctioned after eight minutes of flight.

Musk and SpaceX engineers refused to label either test a failure, saying crucial lessons were learned for subsequent missions.