SpaceX’s Starship spins out of control after flying past points of previous failures

SpaceX's Starship rocket roared into space from Texas on Tuesday but spun out of control about halfway through its flight without achieving some of its most important testing goals, bringing fresh engineering hurdles to CEO Elon Musk's increasingly turbulent Mars rocket programme.

The 122m Starship rocket system, the core of Musk's goal of sending humans to Mars, lifted off from SpaceX's Starbase launch site in Texas, flying beyond the point of two previous explosive attempts earlier this year that sent debris streaking over Caribbean islands and forced dozens of airliners to divert course.

For the latest launch, the ninth full test mission of Starship since the first attempt in April 2023, the upper-stage cruise vessel was lofted to space atop a previously flown booster,  a first such demonstration of the booster's reusability.

However, SpaceX lost contact with the 70m lower-stage booster during its descent before it plunged into the sea, rather than making the controlled splashdown the company had planned.

Starship continued into suborbital space but began to spin uncontrollably about 30 minutes into the mission. The errant spiralling came after SpaceX cancelled a plan to deploy eight mock Starlink satellites into space, the rocket's “Pez” candy dispenser-like mechanism failed to work as designed.

“Not looking great with a lot of our on-orbit objectives for today,” SpaceX broadcaster Dan Huot said on a company live stream.

Musk was scheduled to deliver an update on his space exploration ambitions in a speech from Starbase after the test flight, billed as a live stream presentation about “The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary”. Hours later, he had yet to give the speech and there was no sign he intended to do so.

In a post on X, Musk touted Starship's scheduled shutdown of an engine in space, a step previous test flights achieved last year. He said a leak on Starship's primary fuel tank led to its loss of control.

“Lot of good data to review,” he said.

“Launch cadence for next three flights will be faster, at about one every three to four weeks”.

SpaceX has said the Starship models that have flown this year bear significant design upgrades from previous prototypes, as thousands of company employees work to build a multipurpose rocket capable of putting massive batches of satellites in space, carrying humans back to the moon and ultimately ferrying astronauts to Mars.

The recent setbacks indicate SpaceX is struggling to overcome a complicated chapter of Starship's multibillion-dollar development. But the company's engineering culture, widely considered more risk-tolerant than many of the aerospace industry's more established players, is built on a flight-testing strategy that pushes spacecraft to the point of failure, then fine-tunes improvements through frequent repetition.

Starship's planned trajectory for Tuesday included a nearly full orbit around Earth for a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean to test new designs of its heat shield tiles and revised flaps for steering its blazing re-entry and descent through Earth's atmosphere.

However, its early demise, appearing as a fireball streaking eastward through the night sky over Southern Africa, puts another pause in Musk's speedy development goals for a rocket bound to play a central role in the US space programme.

Nasa plans to use the rocket to land humans on the moon in 2027, though the moon programme faces turmoil amid Musk's Mars-focused influence over US President Donald Trump's administration.

Federal regulators had granted SpaceX a licence for Starship's latest flight attempt four days ago, capping a mishap investigation that had grounded Starship for nearly two months.

The last two test flights, in January and March, were cut short moments after lift-off as the vehicles blew to pieces on ascent, raining debris over parts of the Caribbean and disrupting scores of commercial airline flights in the region.

The Federal Aviation Administration expanded debris hazard zones around the ascent path for Tuesday's launch.

The previous back-to-back failures occurred in early test flight phases that SpaceX had easily achieved before, in a striking setback to a programme that Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur who founded the rocket company in 2002, had sought to accelerate this year.

Musk, the world's wealthiest individual and a key supporter of  Trump, was eager for a success after vowing in recent days to refocus his attention on his business ventures, including SpaceX, after a tumultuous foray into national politics and his attempts at cutting government bureaucracy.

Closer to home, Musk also sees Starship as eventually replacing the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as the workhorse in the company's commercial launch business, which lofts most of the world's satellites and other payloads to low-Earth orbit.

Reuters