Starship loses control before splashdown following launch at Boca Chica Beach

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Starship S35 and Super Heavy booster B14-2 lifted off from SpaceX’s Boca Chica/Starbase production and testing complex at 6:36 p.m. Tuesday.

In its ninth suborbital test flight, Starship flew much farther than two previous attempts but was unable to make a controlled reentry and landing in the Indian Ocean near Australia as planned, due to loss of attitude control roughly halfway into the flight.

The 33-engine Super Heavy B14-2, the first Starship booster to be reused, exploded before it could land in the Gulf of Mexico as planned.

The Federal Aviation Administration announced May 22 that it was allowing SpaceX to launch Starship again with the completion of a “comprehensive safety review” of the SpaceX-led mishap investigation into Flight 8 on March 6, when the uncrewed Starship S34 exploded less than nine minutes after liftoff and stage separation, raining debris over the Caribbean and Atlantic.

SpaceX identified the “most probable root cause” as a “hardware failure in one of the upper stage’s center Raptor engines that resulted in inadvertent propellant mixing and ignition.”

The FAA said it conducted a comprehensive safety review of the SpaceX Starship Flight 8 mishap and determined the company had satisfactorily addressed the causes of the mishap.

“Therefore, the Starship vehicle can return to flight,” the agency said. “The FAA will verify SpaceX implements all corrective actions.”

The FAA also oversaw a SpaceX-led mishap investigation into the loss of Starship S33 minutes into Flight 7 on Jan. 16, resulting in pieces of the rocket falling over part of the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean. SpaceX determined that the most likely cause of that failure was a “harmonic response several times stronger in flight than had been seen during testing” that led to greater stress on the ship’s propulsion system, resulting in propellant leaks and “sustained fires” in Starship’s aft section.

“Prior to making a return to flight determination, the FAA must find that any system, process, or procedure related to the mishap does not affect public safety or any other aspect of the operator’s license,” the agency said.

SpaceX said that following the Flight 8 mishap investigation a number of hardware changes were made to increase Starship’s reliability. Flight 9 marked the first time a Super Heavy booster was reused.

“The upcoming flight test marks the first launch of a flight-proven Super Heavy booster, which previously launched and returned on Starship’s seventh flight test,” SpaceX said prior to Tuesday’s flight. “In addition to the reuse milestone, Super Heavy will fly a variety of experiments aimed at generating data to improve performance and reliability on future boosters.”

B14-2 was one of two boosters SpaceX had successfully “caught” upon returning to the launch tower at Boca Chica.

The company said it was not planning another booster catch attempt with Flight 9. Rather, Super Heavy was set on a trajectory toward an offshore landing point in the Gulf of Mexico in order to attempt several flight experiments “to gather real-world performance data on future flight profiles and off-nominal scenarios,” SpaceX said.

Contact with the Super Heavy was lost approximately six minutes and thirty seconds into the flight, just after a portion of its engines were reignited for the landing burn.

The company repeated the trajectory of Flights 7-8 for Starship’s ninth flight, though by 30 minutes into the flight the ship had lost attitude control and was spinning, killing chances for a controlled reentry and landing under power.

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“Our chances of making it all the way down are pretty slim,” said a SpaceX livestream commentator.

The goals for S35 had been the same as for the previous two Starships: deploying eight mock satellites and reigniting of one of Starship’s six Raptor engines while in space, neither of which happened Tuesday.

The company’s longterm goal is to continue catching boosters for reuse and begin landing Starships back at the launch pad for reuse, and Flight 9 was supposed to have included several experiments focused on enabling Starship to do just that, according to the company, including removing a “significant number of (thermal) tiles” from the ship in order to stress-test vulnerable areas during reentry.

“Starship’s reentry profile is designed to intentionally stress the structural limits of the upper stage’s rear flaps while at the point of maximum entry dynamic pressure,” SpaceX said.

The FAA on May 6 announced the release of a Final Environmental Assessment of SpaceX’s proposal to increase the number of launches from Boca Chica to up to 25 a year, along with up to 50 landings annually, 25 each of Super Heavy and Starship. The FAA issued a Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) related to the proposal, granting SpaceX the modified vehicle operator license necessary for the increased launch cadence.

Editor’s note: This story’s headline and copy has been updated with new information.

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