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.
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.
They were also going to dump extra nitrogen or something into the area to prevent the fire from happening, so that would have had to also fail.
Either way if its the same problem in some way or another hopefully they can fix it before raptor 3 (which should solve a lot of leaks as there’s less tubing). I think raptor 3 is over a year out.
I’d kinda expect a little longer delay as well between the next launch if it was the same issue. If your fix failed, it might be more complicated than you thought.