SpaceX's Starship 8 lifted into the Texas evening sky from its Starbase launch pad near Brownsville on Thursday, but crews lost contact with the spacecraft minutes after liftoff. It was the first test flight since Starship 7 broke apart midflight in January.
“We have lost contact with the ship. It is no longer transmitting telemetry,” a commentator said during SpaceX's livestream. “It appears that several engines have shut down and we are no longer in control of the ship.”
SpaceX confirmed that it has taken additional safety measures to protect the public in the event of an emergency. This is the second Starship mission in a row to fail. The Starship 7 rocket exploded off the coast of Florida just minutes after liftoff.
The Federal Aviation Administration has suspended air traffic in Florida over a lost missile. Such restrictions are imposed when there is a safety risk or adverse weather conditions.
The first stage fuel element landed successfully on a pair of waiting grippers known as “chopsticks,” which caught it minutes after the rocket blasted off into space.
Elon Musk's SpaceX said it has improved Starship's hardware systems to improve the reliability of its fuel cells following the failure of Starship 7, which exploded over the Turks and Caicos Islands on January 16, sending debris into the Caribbean Sea.
SpaceX blamed a fuel leak for the Starship 7 failure and released details of the explosion in its report. No details were released on what caused the Starship 8 mission to fail Thursday, other than that several of the six Merlin engines that power the rocket likely shut down mid-flight.
Starship 8 aimed to achieve the same results that were not achieved during the previous mission.
The Starship 8 mission was expected to follow the same suborbital trajectory as previous launches and would aim to accomplish tasks that were not accomplished during previous testing, including the first deployment of a Starship payload and reusable reentry experiments aimed at returning the upper stage to the launch site for capture.
SpaceX said that in addition to the hardware upgrades, it also improved Starship 8's forward flaps by changing their angle and increasing protection from heat during reentry.
“Starship's reentry profile was designed to intentionally stress the upper stage aft door structural constraints at the point of maximum reentry dynamic pressure,” SpaceX added.
The change is separate from modifications to the rocket's propulsion system, which is different from previous missions, and will increase the amount of fuel in the fuel cell by 25%, which is expected to help both the Starship 8 mission and future launches.
SpaceX also updated systems that allow mechanical grippers to hold and use the reusable fuel cell after Starship successfully reaches low Earth orbit.
Starship 8 was expected to launch into orbit models of SpaceX's next-generation Starlink satellites, which are part of the company's expanding network of internet satellites.
Sourse: www.upi.com
