It can be a fine line between failure and success, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. In one sense, Thursday’s Starship Flight Test 7 was a spectacular success. In another, it was a failure — but still spectacular.Â
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The Starship stack launched nominally at 5:37 p.m. Eastern, consisting of Super Heavy Booster 14 and Ship 33 — the first time a Block 2 Starship has flown and the first booster to include an engine reused from a previous launch.
The Ship’s hot-stage separation from the booster appeared to go well at two minutes and 40 seconds but that’s where things started to go wrong for the doomed second stage. We’ll come back to that in a moment.
The plan was for the B14 booster to return to Earth in the loving embrace of the Mechazilla “chopstick” arms — the very same launch pad it had left just minutes before. That part of the mission was nearly flawless. While only 12 out of the 13 boostback engines fired at two minutes 26 seconds, the booster’s many engines provide enough redundancy to make up for partial failures. Both the boostback burn shutdown (3:29) and the landing burn (6:35) went off flawlessly.
As for the catch… just watch.
Starship booster catch today gives me goosebumps. This is peak human engineering here 🚀 pic.twitter.com/hptG9NhV2B
— Latest in space (@latestinspace) January 17, 2025
“Atmospheric reentry speed is more than twice as fast as a bullet from an assault rifle,” Elon Musk said late last night, “and this is the largest flying object ever made.”
That is the most powerful rocket ever to fly. And instead of falling into the ocean when its job was done, it returned like a fiery high-tech boomerang to exactly where it started. In just two or three years from now — maybe less — SpaceX will launch, catch, refuel, and have each Heavy Booster ready to fly again in hours.
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Not months, like the Space Shuttle. Not weeks, like the SpaceX Falcon 9 workhorse. Hours. “Peak human engineering,” indeed.
Flight Test 5 featured the first attempted catch, and it was a success. The catch on Flight Test 6 had to be waved off due to tower damage caused by the booster’s 33 engines at launch. It likely would have been a success since the “water landing” was flawless. So SpaceX is now two for three on Super Heavy catches.
But the Ship — yikes.
The engines began failing at 7:39 into the mission that was supposed to take it into a partial orbit, followed by a controlled water landing in the Indian Ocean, half a world away. Instead, the Ship reentered the atmosphere over the nearby(ish) Turks & Caicos island in the Caribbean. It created quite the fireworks show.
Two successful catches almost felt like too much going well. Well, at least it was a pretty failure of the Starship.
pic.twitter.com/QhcQNE2I0u— Frank J. Fleming (@IMAO_) January 17, 2025
I wish all my screwups were that pretty.
While I was expecting SpaceX to need at least a few days to collect the data and report on what went wrong, that wasn’t the case. Musk went public with the preliminary autopsy report before dinner. “Preliminary indication is that we had an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the vent capacity,” he posted to X. “Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area.”
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Musk concluded that yesterday’s big boom “Doesn’t change the likely date at which Mars becomes self-sufficient.”
Hell, it doesn’t even budge the date of the next flight test: “Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month,” Musk said.Â
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Hey, how about one more view of Ship’s all-too-early re-entry?
Starship exploding captured on an airplane pic.twitter.com/Y5maQrfmPG
— Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (@teslaownersSV) January 17, 2025
Flight Test 8 is supposed to include the Ship’s first full orbit of the Earth and the first attempt to catch both the upper and lower stages. If successful, it will mark the start of fully reusable rocketry — the Holy Grail of space travel.
See you then.
