ORLANDO, Fla. – Back-to-back mishaps for SpaceX have the Federal Aviation Administration investigating once again after the unmanned Starship rocket broke apart after launch Thursday.
The debris grounded flights at airports in Florida, including Orlando International Airport, and caught the attention of Central Floridians looking to the skies Thursday evening.
News 6 viewer Mike Murray captured cell phone video as he noticed a bright light in the sky over Lake County as he was playing volleyball with his daughter. Similar sights of the apparent rocket streaming across the sky in the Caribbean sparked questions about what happened.
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The rocket was moving east toward what was supposed to be a controlled entry over the Indian Ocean. About eight minutes into the seemingly successful launch from Texas, the 8th test flight of the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket started spinning in space. Video from SpaceX shows mission control noting some of the engines had gone out and contact was lost.
SpaceX issued a statement on social media after the incident:
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“During Starship’s ascent burn, the vehicle experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly and contact was lost. Our team immediately began coordination with safety officials to implement pre-planned contingency responses.
“We will review the data from today’s flight test to better understand root cause. As always, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will offer additional lessons to improve Starship’s reliability.”
SpaceX
Dr. Josh Colwell, a Pegasus Professor and the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Sciences at the University of Central Florida said from an outsider’s point of view it appears to be similar to what happened to Integrated Flight Test Seven.
“I don’t know if the failure mode was exactly the same as what it was on the previous test, but they’ve obviously got a similar sort of problem with what looked like uncontrolled venting or an overpressure situation that leads to engines shutting down and then tumbling and destruction of the upper stage,” said Dr. Colwell. “So similar, at least in the broad strokes, to what happened on the previous test.”
The Federal Aviation Administration is requiring SpaceX to perform a mishap investigation into the loss of the Starship vehicle during launch operations on March 6.
“They very well may have resolved what went wrong on Flight Test Seven. And then that enabled something else to be discovered, which resulted in a new failure mode. So, the root cause may not be the same between these two flight tests. And that’s just going to require the SpaceX team to investigate their data,” said Dr. Colwell. “And we don’t have in the public enough information to determine whether or not it’s the same root cause.”
CBS News space analyst Bill Harwood tells News 6 he expects this investigation will be more involved, considering it is the second one in a row.
“Something obviously happened in the engine section for the six raptor engines shut down prematurely and that put the vehicle out of control. You can see it sort of spinning in space before they lost contact. And, then we’ve all seen YouTube videos of, you know, the thing breaking up and the debris raining down,” said Harwood. “So, we’re going to have to wait for the FAA and for SpaceX to tell us what went wrong. But in the meantime, the starship’s going to be grounded.”
Harwood says this may also be a setback since Starship is critical in NASA’s effort to get humans back to the moon.
“The Starship is absolutely critical to NASA. You know, they’re planning to use it as a moon lander for the Artemis mission, the first landing on the moon,” said Harwood. “I think that two failures in a row raises eyebrows, of course. You know, SpaceX is a different sort of company. They tend to, you know, launch a rocket, get it back, fix things that went wrong, launch again. So, they have this iterative process of making upgrades and improvements, and they do it very rapidly.
“So, it’s possible they’ll overcome this and press ahead and, you know, fully wring out all the bugs,” he continued. “But you know, I don’t know. It raises questions. And we just don’t have enough insight into how SpaceX operates to understand just how significant this really is.”