SpaceX’s latest attempt to launch its Starship ended with another explosion on Saturday, but the massive vehicle reached farther into the sky than ever before.
SpaceX had made a lot of changes to the Starship and Super Heavy rocket since an attempt earlier this year to get to orbit ended in a fireball and subsequently grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration for more than six months.
Now with a new FAA license, Elon Musk’s company was able to send the rocket back up Saturday from its Boca Chica, Texas, launch facility Starbase.
Liftoff of Starship! pic.twitter.com/qXnGXXZP5k
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 18, 2023
“All systems and weather are go,” SpaceX posted on X, noting propellant load of the Super Heavy booster began after 6 a.m. with Musk chiming in “Ad Astra.”
Unlike April, the company managed to reach stage separation with the Starship upper stage lighting its engines and breaking away from the Super Heavy booster.
Super Heavy, though, was destroyed after getting past where it was able to seven months earlier, and then SpaceX lost contact with the Starship upper stage about eight minutes after liftoff while on its way to space.
Watch Starship’s second integrated flight test → https://t.co/bJFjLCiTbK https://t.co/cahoRQ72lm
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 18, 2023
The attempt exceeded where the April 20 attempt failed by achieving stage separation.
The goal was to again get the 397-foot-tall, two-stage rocket off the ground, have it separate over the Gulf of Mexico where the Super Heavy booster will make a hard water landing while Starship would continue on an orbital trajectory 2/3 the way around the Earth and make its own hard water splashdown in the Pacific Ocean about 90 minutes later north of Hawaii.
The company only got the OK to fly from the FAA after it signed off on the 63 corrections needed as defined in the “mishap” report into Starship and Super Heavy’s first attempt.
Record-setting SpaceX Starship launches, but blows up 4 minutes into test flight
On that launch, the rocket generating more than 17 million pounds of thrust on liftoff did get off the ground, but caused major damage to the launch pad.
The Starship upper stage was also unable to separate from the Super Heavy booster, so after only making it to 24 miles altitude over the Gulf of Mexico, teams sent it a self-destruct command, although the rocket did not explode immediately.
“The first flight test of a fully integrated Starship and Super Heavy was a critical step in advancing the capabilities of the most powerful launch system ever developed,” SpaceX wrote on its website. “Starship’s first flight test provided numerous lessons learned that are directly contributing to several upgrades being made to both the vehicle and ground infrastructure to improve the probability of success on future Starship flights.”
The investigation into launch attempt revealed leaking propellant caused fires in the Super Heavy booster that severed the connection with the vehicle’s primary flight computer leading to a loss of communication to most of the booster’s engines so SpaceX has no control over the vehicle, the company stated.
“SpaceX has since implemented leak mitigations and improved testing on both engine and booster hardware,” the site reads. “As an additional corrective action, SpaceX has significantly expanded Super Heavy’s pre-existing fire suppression system in order to mitigate against future engine bay fires.”
The flight termination system’s delayed destruction was also addressed, so SpaceX requalified the system to improve reliability.
For the shredded launch pad, SpaceX has added a water-cooled steel flame deflector and reinforced the pad foundation.
“We have sort of a steel sandwich, which is basically two thick plates of steel that are welded together with channels going through it,” Musk said in an interview this summer. “So you basically have this water-cooled steel sandwich and there are perforations in the top, so it will actually shoot a lot of water out of the top. Think of it as a gigantic upside-down shower head.”
The April launch sent rubble blasting out miles from pad.
“It’s going to basically blast water upwards while the rocket is over the pad to counteract the massive amount of heat from the booster,” Musk said. “The booster is basically like the world’s biggest cutting forge with a massive amount of force, so it’s not just heat, but a massive amount of force.”
The launch pad damage brought up NASA concerns as SpaceX was building out a second Starship launch site at its Kennedy Space Center launch complex, and potential damage there would threaten SpaceX’s abilities to launch its Falcon 9 rockets on its Commercial Crew Program missions. That prompted SpaceX to build out a second crew access arm to be able to launch humans not only from KSC, but from its neighboring launch facility at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
“We’re actually going for overkill on the steel sandwich and the concrete so that should leave the base of the pad in much better shape than last time,” Musk said.
On top of changes to address known issues, SpaceX has introduced a hot-stage separation system that includes a vented connector between the Super Heavy first stage and the Starship upper stage. This will allow Starship’s second-stage engines to fire while still on an upward trajectory before a full breakaway from the Super Heavy stage.
“We shut down most of the engines on the booster leaving just a few running and then at the same time start the engines on the ship, or upper stage, which obviously results in kind of blasting the booster, so then you have to protect the top of the boost stage from getting incinerated by the upper stage engines,” Musk said. “This is something the Soviets and Russians have used quite a bit in their rocket designs.”
SpaceX also added a new thrust vector control system for each of the Super Heavy’s 33 Raptor engines making them fully electric instead of hydraulic control, and reducing potential points of failure, the company stated.
“This rapid iterative development approach has been the basis for all of SpaceX’s major innovative advancements, including Falcon, Dragon and Starlink,” the company stated. “Testing development flight hardware in a flight environment is what enables our teams to quickly learn and execute design changes and hardware upgrades to improve the probability of success in the future.”
Starship is the replacement for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, and when fully realized would become completely reusable with both the Super Heavy and Starship making vertical landings after launch.
Liftoff! pic.twitter.com/BTiYdsdhnc
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 18, 2023
SpaceX isn’t slowing down with those launches though, having sent up another Falcon 9 with 23 Starlink satellites just after midnight Saturday from Cape Canaveral, marking the Space Coast’s 64th launch of the year, with SpaceX responsible for 60 of them. It’s flown another 24 from California and has a 25th slated for late Saturday night.
NASA is counting on Starship’s success to assist their Artemis moon and Mars programs. A version of Starship won NASA’s first human landing system contract to be used on the Artemis III mission, currently planned for no earlier than December 2025.
For that, astronauts flying in the Orion spacecraft will dock with Starship and at least two, including the first woman, will venture down to the moon’s south pole, marking humans’ return to the lunar surface for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972.
SpaceX Starship delays could shift Artemis III away from moon landing, official says
“They need to launch multiple times, not just for us, but for them,” said NASA’s Jim Free, current head of the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate back in August. “And then they need to launch multiple times for us, so we really want to see them find the success in their their launches, including the next one.”
Free is set to become the No. 3 leader at NASA after Bob Cabana’s retirement at the end of the year, and will have a lot invested in tracking SpaceX’s success. He suggested delays could mean shifting the moon landing mission deeper into the decade.
“We really are trying to get in the details of that schedule because when we come up with a date, December of ’25, or whatever that date might be, we want to have confidence for our teams, that we’ll all have a realistic path to get there.”
