Starship blasted off Tuesday for another test flight—and within minutes, the ninth test flight from Starbase was more successful than this year's previous two launches, which both exploded midair within 10 minutes of liftoff. Things went awry later in the flight, however. An attempt to deploy dummy satellites did not work out. SpaceX's Dan Huot said a hatch on the side of the huge spacecraft didn't fully open, CNN reports. Huot later said SpaceX had lost control of Starship and a second experiment, an attempt to reignite its engines, had been called off. "At this point, we are in kind of a spin," Huot said.
In what NBC News calls a "bittersweet ending" for the flight, it made what Huot said was an "uncontrolled reentry" and broke apart over the Indian Ocean, where a large landing zone had been cleared. "As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly," SpaceX said in a post on X. On the livestream, Huot said, "We are trying to do something that is impossibly hard, and it's not always not going to reach it in a straight line. We said there's going to be bumps. There's going to be turns. But seeing that ship in space today was a hell of a moment for us."
Huot said that with this launch, they did not try to return the Super Heavy rocket booster to the launch site to be caught with giant "chopsticks." He said it met its "demise" in the ocean. The SpaceX team conducted experiments with Super Heavy on its way down, but it broke apart sooner than expected, Space.com reports. This was the first time Starship used a recycled booster, reports the AP. This story has been updated with new developments. (More Starship stories.)
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