SpaceX’s Starship Spacecraft exploded on Thursday after lifting it out of Texas, dooming an attempt to deploy a mock satellite with two consecutive obstacles in Elon Musk’s Mars Rocket program this year.
Several videos on social media showed the twilight sky near South Florida striping the Bahamas after a split in space.
The failure comes just over a month after the company’s seventh spaceship flight ended with an explosive failure. The successive accidents occurred during the early mission phase that SpaceX had previously easily surpassed, indicating a serious setback in the program that Musk was trying to speed up this year.
The 403-foot (123-meter) rocket system was lifted from the rocket facility from the vast Bocachica at SpaceX, Texas, at 6:30pm (2300 GMT).
However, a few minutes later, SpaceX’s live stream showed a stage on top of the spacecraft being spun in space, but visualization of the engines on the rocket showed that multiple engines had been shut down before the company was confirmed to have lost contact with the ship.
“Unfortunately, this happened last time, so now there’s some practice,” SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot said in a live stream.
The rocket was not carrying astronauts. SpaceX stopped livestreams shortly after launch, and did not show where debris would fall.
SpaceX posted online that “the vehicle experienced rapid, unplanned disassembly and contact was lost.” The company reviewed flight data to understand the root cause of the explosion, adding that “success comes from what we have learned, and today’s flights provide additional lessons to improve the reliability of the spacecraft.”
With wreckage scattered across parts of the Caribbean, the Federal Aviation Administration has temporarily issued ground stops for commercial flights at Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach and Orlando airports for “space launch debris” at least until 8pm. We also detoured flights around Türkiye and Caicos.
The FAA said it has launched a disaster investigation into the incident, saying SpaceX should look into the cause of the failure and get an agency sign-off before Starship can fly again.
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Since it exploded in space on January 16th, Starship’s first attempt at launch has fallen into Musk’s development vision. He aims to create a rocket that can send larger batches of satellites into space and humans to the Moon and Mars.
The January spacecraft failure ended eight minutes after flight when the rocket exploded in space and rained on the Caribbean islands. The explosion was caused by a fire that ignited near the ship’s liquid oxygen tank. At the time, the FAA ordered SpaceX to temporarily ground commercial flights and conduct an investigation. SpaceX said it changed the fuel line and fuel temperature.
