Starship‘s seventh test flight ended in an explosion when the ship’s upper stage “experienced a rapid unplanned disassembly during ascent” over the Atlantic Ocean. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk posted a video of the incident, which shows debris flying and lighting up the sky. During the company’s webcast, Dan Huot of SpaceX’s communications team said that they “saw the engines shut down on telemetry” at the end of the ascent, and that they eventually lost contact with the “Ship,” as the company calls the upper stage of the ship. SpaceX said in a tweet that it will continue to analyze the data obtained during the tests to understand the root cause of the explosion.
After the incident, the US Federal Aviation Administration issued recommendations for pilots, warning them about the fall of debris in certain areas. Prior to the test, SpaceX stated that it was intended to “launch a new generation of spacecraft with significant upgrades” and was supposed to be the first test of Starship payload deployment using 10 Starlink simulators.
Despite the fact that the upper stage of the Starship burned up, the test was still partially successful. The ship’s Raptor engines caught fire during ascent before the ground team lost contact with it about 8 minutes after the start of the flight. SpaceX was also able to return the super-heavy launch vehicle by hooking the rocket’s first stage with mechanical manipulators on the launch tower at Starbase.
