Spacex's Starship And Super Heavy Booster Crash

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

SpaceX's Starship has failed, again.

Elon Musk's private rocketry company staged the ninth launch of the craft on Tuesday and notched up one success by managing to leave the launchpad by re-using a Super Heavy booster for the first time. But multiple fails for Flight 9 followed.

SpaceX paused the countdown for Tuesday's launch at the T-40 mark for some final tweaks, then sent Starship into the sky atop the Super Heavy at 1937 Eastern Daylight Time.

After stage separation, the booster crash-landed six minutes into the flight, after SpaceX used a steeper-than-usual angle of attack for its re-entry "to intentionally push Super Heavy to the limits, giving us real-world data about its performance that will directly feed in to making the next generation booster even more capable."

The Starship upper stage, meanwhile, did better than the previous two tests flights, in that it actually reached space, but subsequently things (like the craft) got well and truly turned around.

One of the goals for Musk's space crew was to release eight mocked up Starlink satellites into orbit. SpaceX already failed at its last two attempts to do this when the pod doors never opened. And it was third time unlucky last night when the payload door failed yet again to fully open to release the dummy satellites. SpaceX has not yet provided a reason for the malfunction.

Another goal for Flight 9 was to check out the performance of the ship's heatshield - SpaceX specifically flew it with 100 missing (on purpose) heatshield tiles so that it could test key vulnerable areas "across the vehicle during reentry." (The spacecraft also employed Multiple metallic tile options, including one with active cooling" to test different materials for future missions.) But it needed controlled reentry to properly assess stress-test that, and that failed too.

After the doors remained stubbornly closed, a "subsequent attitude control error resulted in bypassing the Raptor relight and prevented Starship from getting into the intended position for reentry." It began spinning out of control, blowing up, er, experiencing "a rapid unscheduled disassembly" upon re-entry.

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