SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft exploded on Thursday minutes after lifting off from Texas, dooming an attempt to deploy mock satellites in the second consecutive failure this year for Elon Musk’s Mars rocket program.
Several videos on social media showed fiery debris streaking through the dusk skies near south Florida and the Bahamas after Starship’s breakup in space, which occurred shortly after it began to spin uncontrollably with its engines cut off, a SpaceX livestream of the mission showed.
The failure comes just more than a month after the company’s seventh Starship flight also ended in an explosive failure. The back-to-back mishaps occurred in early mission phases that SpaceX has easily surpassed previously, indicating serious setbacks for a program Musk has sought to speed up this year.
Ugh, I don’t actually hate the hardware rich testing strategy SpaceX uses, but you’re supposed to learn from your failures before launching the next rocket.
This looked like almost exactly the same issue - fire in the skirt area that catastrophically destroyed the engines.
Pretty sure the other fire was on the inside due to an engine leak. This fire/leak was on the outside.
Both around the enginee, but different spots.
The thing they changed was cutting holes in the area where the fire was last time to “ventilate” it. I think it’s the same fire just blowing out the holes and melting something different.