Posted on 05/28/2025 5:54:11 AM PDT by Red Badger
The Starship test flight encountered problems approximately 30 minutes into its uncrewed journey.
Starship’s ninth flight test launch. - SpaceX/X
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On May 27th, SpaceX launched the ninth test flight of its 403-feet (123-metre) Starship megarocket.
Despite reaching orbit, the vehicle then lost attitude control, resulting in an uncontrolled reentry and its third consecutive failure.
After lifting off from Starbase, Texas, at 7:36 p.m. Eastern, the Starship test flight encountered problems approximately 30 minutes into its uncrewed journey.
An onboard fuel leak caused the mega-rocket to spin uncontrollably in space, leading to an earlier-than-planned re-entry into the atmosphere.
SpaceX announced on social media that Starship underwent a “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” indicating it burst apart.
As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly. Teams will continue to review data and work toward our next flight test.
With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship’s…
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 28, 2025
Fuel tank issue
Prior to this recent launch, Starship had undergone eight integrated test flights with its Super Heavy booster.
Reportedly, this flight follows a March 6 explosion, which led the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to divert flights and temporarily halt departures at four Florida airports due to falling debris.
SpaceX’s Starship is designed for full reusability with its Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage.
Flight 9 saw Starship’s two stages separate successfully, with the upper stage reaching space — a notable improvement compared to its last two flights.
However, SpaceX ultimately lost both stages before achieving all mission objectives.
A ground equipment issue briefly delayed flight 9’s liftoff, but the mission aimed to address prior engine problems that led to upper stage loss.
The Starship’s six Raptor engines performed as expected, successfully placing the vehicle into orbit, reported SpaceNews.
However, footage from the vehicle shortly after engine shutdown seemed to reveal propellant venting and a gradual roll.
“We are in a little bit of a spin. We did spring a leak in some of the fuel tank systems inside of Starship. At this point, we’ve essentially lost our attitude control with Starship,” Dan Huot, the SpaceX webcast host, stated.
After losing attitude control, a controlled reentry was impossible.
To prepare for reentry, SpaceX decided to “passivate” the vehicle, which involved venting its leftover propellant.
Intermittent video showed the reentry beginning over the Indian Ocean about 40 minutes after liftoff, with visible flap damage.
This marks the third consecutive Starship test flight that failed to achieve a controlled reentry and soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
“Starship’s ninth flight test marked a major milestone for reuse with the first flight-proven Super Heavy booster launching from Starbase, and once more returned Starship to space,” the SpaceX statement stated.
Failed to deploy dummy satellites
A primary objective of Flight 9 was to open Starship‘s payload bay and deploy eight dummy Starlink satellites.
However, the payload door malfunctioned, leading to the cancellation of the satellite release. It remains unclear if this door malfunction was linked to the propellant leak and subsequent loss of attitude control.
The mission also couldn’t perform its intended tests of new heat shield tiles or stress-testing of the vehicle’s vulnerable sections.
Despite these setbacks, the spirit of innovation at SpaceX remains unbroken.
As manufacturing engineering manager Jessie Anderson stated, “This is exactly the SpaceX way. We’re going to learn, iterate, and iterate over and over again until we figure it out.”
And they plan to do so quickly. Elon Musk hinted that the next three Starship test launches could occur every three to four weeks.
With the ambition of establishing human presence on the Moon and Mars, SpaceX is engineering Starship, which stands as the largest and most powerful rocket yet.
Interestingly, Musk recently made a bold claim stating that the Starship rocket could be launched to Mars by late 2026, a mission that will also include Tesla’s humanoid.
I hope they are getting good data out of these test flights, because the time between launches is expanding and the results do not seem to be hitting a decent percentage of the published mission goals.
Booster... First time a reused Starship booster. Including 22 of the motors being “used” including the somehow famous PIE motor number 314. They did multiple re-lights during descent and it was not a “chopstick” landing from the mission profile because of the high probability of hardware failure.
The Ship. Still a V2 with strategic heat tile placement to test new thermal coatings. This was the first of the V2’s to hit SECO... but that was about the only mission objective I am aware of that actually happened.
PEZ door didn’t open. They had valves stick open causing massive fuel loss. Because of that, they lost attitude control and then the RUD at about 50 some miles up and at 17k MPH... They never even made it to the re-light to see if the vacuum engines would blow up...
So... a couple of positive events... and I hope they got a lot of data... But the optics of this look VERY bad IMO. Yes, I’m aware of the iterative engineering approach... but this seems excessive for the hype they are putting in to each launch.
That kind of failure seems rather strange at this stage of his rocket endeavors. Purposely sabotaged?
They may look like failures, but they are miles ahead of their next closest competitors..............
My comment wasn’t based upon your comment, but it was the conclusion I immediately went to.
It has crossed my mind..................
It’s just the logical conclusion for a problem like that. He went to the space station & rescued stranded astronauts without incident. Thank goodness they didn’t do their sabotage on that mission.
I understand. Had an earlier than planned deceleration into a vehicle in front of me 30 minutes after takeoff.
Keep at it. One day, success.
We almost had one of those over the weekend.
Some fool tourist made a left turn into the wrong lane of a four lane road right in front of us. Was coming head on until we swerved to the other lane! Thank God there was no one else in that lane!............
It could be that they are deliberately pushing the envelope just to see where it is, but without a firm baseline of multiple successes, I'm not sure that will produce really useful results. They may just be introducing so many changes that working out all the permutations of failure becomes too difficult to test.
It was a redesigned ship and they were testing it to the breaking point [ test to failure ] - like deliberately removing 100 tiles from a critical area on the ship. Its all about the data, since they have many more launches this year. A successful flight is just a bonus for the data it would provide.
how hard it still is to do right.
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Its not about doing it right. Its about collecting data on what works and what does not under extreme duress.
The fox4 news readers in DFW were just giddy while telling the story of Elon’s rocket launch snafu. Media is corrupt, totally….
And ever since “Rocky Jones Space Ranger” I had been waiting for ships to be reusable and land like they took off.
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I’ve been waiting since Goddard ...
From StarShip Flight 1 to StarShip Flight 8 they had to wait for the FAA to investigate, approve, then issue a launch license, while the EPA was conducting investigations for the local environmental wackos. All that changed with Fight 9. Now they can more or less launch at will. So Flight 10 will happen just as soon as they rejigger the next booster and ship to be ready for launch.
Article is very poorly written! “Orbit” was not achieved nor was it ever an objective for this flight.
Purposely sabotaged?
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The whole Starship has been redesigned from the earlier successful ones. They are testing a new design.
Test To Failure is the method - many failures are to be expected before success.
“third consecutive failure”
“a notable improvement compared to its last two flights”
I love how this is described.
To rephrase; this 3rd flight TEST gained significant successes after the lessons learned from the prior 2 test flights.
They do the hot staging to keep the rocket momentum going. When they previously separated the first stage they would separate before the second stage lit their engines. This would cause the second stage rocket to start slowing down before they could light the engines.
By hot staging they can keep the momentum going thereby saving fuel. But they have to make sure the top of the first stage can handle the second stage exhaust.
try, try again.
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