SpaceX He was successfully arrested Her super heavy booster for the second time. During Starship’s seventh test flight from Boca Chica, Texas, the Super Heavy vehicle descended into the launch tower’s “chopstick” arms, allowing it to grab hold of the booster.
Despite the successful capture, SpaceX lost communications with the Starship spacecraft mounted atop the booster. “It successfully separated from the Super Heavy booster, but during that ascent phase, two engines shut down, and shortly thereafter, we lost contact with the vehicle,” SpaceX’s Kate Tice said during the broadcast. “We assume we’ve lost the ship.”
According to SpaceX“The spacecraft experienced a rapid, unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn,” but she said teams are still reviewing data to find out why.
Several people who said they were on the Turks and Caicos Islands said they saw the wreckage of the spacecraft upon its return to publish videos Including on social media.
This version of the Starship featured “significant improvements to reliability and performance” this time around, making the vehicle slightly longer. According to SpaceX.
Along with a redesigned propulsion system and improved flight computer, this flight included a new heat shield with “multiple metal tile options, including an option with active cooling” to test alternative materials and a “backup layer to protect against missing or damaged tiles.” Before the flight, SpaceX also said that in the spacecraft’s upper stage, “a large number of tiles will be removed to stress-test weak areas throughout the vehicle,” but it is not known whether this was a factor in its destruction.
The super-heavy booster in this test was also the first to reuse a Raptor engine from a previous flight test.
At 403 feet long, Starship is the largest launch vehicle ever. It has two parts: the Starship, which is designed to carry crew and cargo into orbit, and the Super Heavy Booster, which comes equipped with 33 SpaceX Raptor engines that help propel the spacecraft into space. Both the Starship and its super-heavy booster can be reused.
During its seventh test flight, Starship was supposed to deploy 10 Starlink “simulators” for the first time. These fictitious satellites are the same size and weight as Starlink’s actual internet satellites, but they were not meant to remain in space. Instead, they would have had “the same suborbital trajectory as the spacecraft” and would “die on reentry.”
January 16 update: The result of the flight is noted and videos of the wreckage over the Turks and Caicos Islands are added.