Boom! Bang!

Here's what went right — and wrong — on today's test flight

SpaceX’s Starship soared through some signficant milestones. But it also failed to hit some key test objectives. 

By Jackie Wattles

SpaceX

• Liftoff was a win. The Super Heavy rocket booster, which had been flown on one prior mission, successfully lit up all 33 of its engines. It marked the first time SpaceX has reused a Super Heavy booster.
• Super Heavy crash-landed, and SpaceX lost contact with the booster after it fired its engines for a landing burn. The vehicle did safely separate from the Starship spacecraft, and SpaceX never expected to bring it back to a safe landing on dry ground. The company was testing several risky tweaks, hoping to figure out how the booster can make a safe landing using less fuel.
• Starship, the upper spacecraft often referred to as the “ship,” was not able to deploy eight dummy satellites as hoped. The vehicle’s side hatch did not open all the way, preventing SpaceX from testing out how Starship might one day release cargo into orbit.
• Starship made it much farther into its flight path than the two prior test flights, during which it was destroyed minutes after takeoff. But the spacecraft did not make it all the way to a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
• Mission controllers lost contact with Starship, and the vehicle began flying out of control because of a leak in the vehicle’s fuel tank, according to SpaceX’s Dan Huot. It’s likely that the ship was torn apart as it slammed back into Earth’s thick inner atmosphere.
• SpaceX did not attempt to relight Starship’s engines while in space. That was another testing milestone SpaceX had to forgo because of the loss of control.