Starship has arrived in space, then has lost control. Spacex is costing horrors to get out of the bump

Long faces once again in Spacex, despite the advances that Starship’s ninth flight has achieved with respect to its predecessors. And the thing has ended badly for the ship anyway.

First Super Heavy. The highest rocket in the world took off seven minutes late at 18:37 of May 27, local time in Starbase. The takeoff was perfect, with 33 of the 33 Raptor engines roaring at the same time, which marks the first reuse of a super heavy propeller.

Booster 14 had first flown on flight 7. Although they were restored between Misiones, 29 of their 33 Raptor engines were second hand. One of them, on 314, has taken off today for the third and last time, moving forward in the rapid reuse objective of the two starship stages.

Raptor 2 Restored Motors for Flight 9, including 314 with the reference to the PI number

Disintegrated in full return. Two and a half minutes after takeoff, the ship turned on its six engines and separated from the propeller. Spacex has tried for the first time a super heavy turn in a controlled direction to save fuel. It has gone well.

Next, Booster 14 initiated a more aggressive return sequence, with a higher angle of attack. Six and a half minutes after takeoff, when the propeller had to turn on its engines, it exploded in the air.

Due to the experiments in the return maneuver, an explosion was not out of the pools, but it was the worst scenario in this flight phase. The data that Spacex has collected will help to avoid being repeated.

Starship has reached space. Meanwhile, the upper stage of the rocket, the Starship 35 ship, continued its trip, reaching for the first time in three attempts a suborbital trajectory that would take it from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean.

Although the failure streak of the two previous missions has broken (7 due to a harmonic response that caused propellant leaks and 8 for a hardware failure in a Raptor engine), the ship ended up failing anyway. It is the third prototype of the second generation of Starship. All have failed.

Starlink satellite models (center) that were left without going out for the gate (right)

The gate has not opened. One of the objectives of this flight was the deployment of eight new generation Starlink satellite models, which would have meant the first time Starship released a useful load.

Scheduled for about 18 and a half minutes after takeoff, the test could not be carried out because the cargo bay gate, a mechanism that Spacex knows as “fish dispenser”, did not finish opening, forcing the attempt to leave, as happened on flight 3 of Starship.

The ship has lost control. The other similarity of flight 9 with flight 3 is that Starship lost control 30 minutes after launch. The ship began to rotate uncontrolled after Spacex detected a leak in some of the fuel tank systems, many of which are used for the attitude control of the vehicle.

As on flight 3, Spacex had to cancel another of the important experiments of this mission: the redempted of one of the Raptor engines in the space flight. But the worst of the failure was not to prove, once again, the improvements and experiments related to the thermal shield and the new ailerons of the ship.

Spacex lost contact with Starship 35 during the reentry, thus ending a mission with more shadows than lights. The third second generation starship It has ended like its two predecessors: disintegrating.