SpaceX flew the Starship for the ninth time on Tuesday, with the upper-stage Starship spacecraft performing better than its two previous flights. However, the spacecraft’s reentry, about 45 minutes into its flight, didn’t go as planned, with the vehicle breaking up over the Indian Ocean.
The Super Heavy booster, meanwhile, blew up during its descent. The explosion wasn’t actually a big surprise as SpaceX was testing a new system that put greater pressure on the vehicle.
As SpaceX assesses all of the data from the ninth flight of the most powerful rocket ever to fly, take a moment to enjoy these stunning scenes captured during the early stages of Tuesday’s test mission.
The Starship rocket, comprising the upper-stage Starship spacecraft and first-stage Super Heavy booster, heads skyward from SpaceX’s Starbase launch site in Boca Chica, Texas, on Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. local time.
Sixteen seconds into flight, and the rocket is in good shape.
The entire vehicle is just over 120 meters tall and creates a record 17 million pounds of thrust at launch.
Twenty-eight seconds into flight and the rocket is now traveling at 393 km/h (244 mph).
The Super Heavy’s Raptor engines burn brightly as the rocket powers the Starship spacecraft to orbit.
A view over the launch site from a camera attached to the Starship vehicle.
This stunning light show occurred just as the Starship spacecraft separated from the Super Heavy booster, whose Raptor engines appear as a bright white light in the center of the image.
Here we see the first-stage booster returning to Earth at high speed. “Super Heavy might not have a very smooth ride down, we’re putting it through this higher angle of attack …. increasing drag,” a SpaceX commentator noted during the livestream. “We’ve done this in wind tunnels, we’ve done this in computer modeling, it shows that sometimes the control isn’t great.”
Just over six minutes into the flight, the Super Heavy suffered a catastrophic explosion. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, and the SpaceX team will have gathered plenty of data to help it refine the design for the Starship’s next test flight.
