SpaceX’s Starship Lost Shortly After Launch of Second Test Flight

SpaceX’s Starship failed its test flight this morning when the automated flight termination system triggered, and engineers lost contact with the craft about 10 minutes into its journey. This marks the company’s second attempt at sending a Starship on a near-orbital trip, a 90-minute voyage that would have gone almost around the world. An initial test flight also failed in April, exploding four minutes after liftoff and flinging debris throughout the surrounding area.

As before, today’s launch took place at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas. But this time, all of the 33 Raptor engines appeared to ignite properly, and the Starship’s stage separation from the Super Heavy booster worked more or less as planned. The vehicle survived max q, or the point in its ascent when it’s under the most pressure from the atmosphere and its own velocity. About three minutes after launch, the Starship successfully separated from the Super Heavy booster, after which the booster exploded, something SpaceX officials typically refer to with the euphemism “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” or RUD.

“So far today has been incredibly successful, even with the RUD of the Super Heavy booster,” said Kate Tice, SpaceX’s quality systems engineer on the company’s webcast.

But before Starship could reach orbit, SpaceX mission control lost contact with it and stopped receiving data. At about 12 minutes into the flight, the automated flight termination system triggered—aborting the flight and making the second stage undergo RUD, too.

If Starship had successfully flown, it would have reached an altitude of about 146 miles and was planned to splash down at around 8:30 central time off the coast of Kauai, Hawaii.

This is the second time that a Starship test flight has gotten off to a promising start but failed several minutes into the flight. According to a statement on the company’s website, SpaceX later determined that in the first few minutes of the April flight, propellant leaked from the Super Heavy booster and caused fires that severed the connection with the primary flight computer. That’s why the upper stage and booster failed to separate, SpaceX concluded. Engineers lost control of the vehicle and had to abort, blowing the rocket up with the flight termination system.

The first, brief test flight on April 20 “provided numerous lessons learned,” SpaceX officials said in a statement posted on the company’s website on November 10. The April explosion destroyed the launch pad, causing what SpaceX CEO Elon Musk described as a “rock tornado,” and rained debris onto the surrounding area. As a result, SpaceX and the US Federal Aviation Administration conducted a joint “mishap investigation.” Officials from NASA and the US National Transportation Safety Board served as observers. The FAA completed that process on September 8, stating SpaceX had to deal with 63 issues to mitigate debris, redesign vehicle hardware to prevent fires and leaks, and redesign the launch pad before Starship could fly again.

SpaceX’s subsequent upgrades to the rocket included “a hot-stage separation system and an electronic thrust vector control system for the Super Heavy’s engines,” and their improvements to the launch infrastructure included “reinforcements to the pad foundation and a water-cooled steel flame deflector,” according to the November 10 statement.

Meanwhile, as part of the process, the US Fish and Wildlife Service was required to look into the local environmental effects of the upgraded Boca Chica launch site, which sits next to a wildlife refuge and a public beach. The agency began that review in October. Several threatened and endangered species live in the area, including the Gulf Coast jaguarundi, ocelot, five species of sea turtles, and birds like the piping plover, red knot, and Northern aplomado falcon.

Also in October, apparently frustrated by the long regulatory process, senior SpaceX officials, including William Gerstenmaier, the company’s vice president for build and flight reliability, conducted rare media interviews arguing that regulators aren’t keeping up with the pace of industry. Gerstenmaier and other space industry executives also participated in a US Senate hearing, which did not include FAA officials, calling for streamlined regulations and more FAA resources for issuing launch licenses. Meanwhile, Musk complained on X about all the rules and regulations. “Each passing year, we tie ourselves down with more and more strings, until, like Gulliver, we can no longer move,” he wrote.

The FAA did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment about the time needed for the mishap investigation and review prior to the new launch license.

The FAA finished the safety portion of its review on October 31, and the Fish and Wildlife Service finished its environmental assessment on November 15. The agency concluded that the upgraded launch site and rocket do not introduce new environmental risks. The FAA’s launch authorization for today’s Starship flight came immediately afterward—only two days before November 17, when a potential government shutdown could have closed both agencies and delayed the launch authorization. “The FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy and financial responsibility requirements,” the agency wrote in a statement.

The most important upgrade, which the Fish and Wildlife officials focused their attention on, was SpaceX’s new water deluge system. After the first launch, the agency’s biologists were reportedly in disbelief that SpaceX, at the time, lacked flame suppression technology like this for Starship—an industry and space agency standard. Such systems are designed to dissipate some of the heat and noise generated by a rocket. SpaceX’s new system involves flooding 358,000 gallons of water from ground tanks into steel plates and releasing them through holes in the plating, as the Fish and Wildlife assessment describes it. In April, Musk characterized it as a “massive super strong steel shower head pointing up.”

Assessments of this second test flight will show whether SpaceX’s new system is effective at reducing debris and pollution. What’s clear is that not having such a system won’t work. “Steel is a ductile material rather than a brittle one, and it can’t fracture like concrete did” on the first launch, says Phil Metzger, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida who studies space economics. “Our analysis showed that the concrete fractured, the pressure drove hot gas through the cracks. The launch put the pad under tension, and it blew apart. It was literally an explosion, comparable to a small volcanic eruption.” But Metzger believes the new deluge system will solve this problem and there are no significant risks of debris or contaminated deluge water.

The Fish and Wildlife analysis included examining the water following SpaceX’s static fire tests in August. They found high levels of chromium and zinc (components of stainless steel) and aluminum and iron in the water, but a subsequent test found lower concentrations of those metals. That won’t assuage the concerns of environmentalists, like David Newstead, an environmental scientist at the Texas’s Coastal Bend Bays and Estuaries Program. “That deluge water goes gushing out into the neighboring wildlife refuge, and I wouldn’t want it happening next door to me,” he says.

On May 1, local and environmental groups filed a lawsuit against the FAA and SpaceX alleging that the FAA failed to fully investigate the potential environmental harms from the SpaceX Starship program at Boca Chica. That suit remains ongoing. SpaceX did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

SpaceX and its partners are counting on Starship to fly safely within the next two or three years. The company will need many more flights in order to test rocket and spacecraft hardware and software, and how well the heat shield fares on reentry. SpaceX is working to fulfill its big NASA moon landing contracts for the Artemis 3 and 4 missions in 2026 and 2028. (Weeks after the first Starship test flight failed, NASA announced a moon lander contract with SpaceX competitor Blue Origin for the Artemis 5 moon mission in 2029.)

SpaceX also has crewed spaceflights with private passengers aboard Starship planned for later this decade: for the DearMoon project, financed by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, and for the third Polaris Program spaceflight, led by Jared Isaacman, the billionaire CEO of the payment processing company Shift4 Payments. In 2021, Isaacman flew on Inspiration4, SpaceX’s first all-civilian Crew Dragon flight, and will also lead the first Polaris flight aboard a SpaceX Dragon early next year, which will include up to five days in Earth orbit and the first commercial spacewalk.