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The massive Starship and Super Heavy booster 9 with all its 33 Raptor engines firing, lifted off successfully Saturday(Nov. 18), at about 1300 UTC; from SpaceX's Starbase test and manufacturing facility in Boca Chica, Texas, in the company's second integrated flight test(IFT-2) of the megarocket.
Shortly after stage separation, the rocket's massive Super Heavy booster, which was fully loaded with about 4500 metric tonnes of propellant, exploded in what SpaceX called a "rapid unscheduled disassembly(RUD)." The Starship upper-stage vehicle also detonated later.
"What we do believe right now is that the automated flight termination system(FTS) on second stage appears to have triggered very late in the burn, as we were headed downrange out over the Gulf of Mexico," John Insprucker, SpaceX's principal integration engineer, said during a live webcast today.
This was the second test flight for the fully integrated Starship, which consists of the Super Heavy first-stage booster and Starship upper-stage spacecraft. April 20 test flight(IFT-1) ended with a self-destruct command and explosion about four minutes into flight.
Unlike during IFT-1, successful stage separation occurred on Saturday's flight test. SpaceX implemented: "hot staging," in which the upper stage's engines begin firing before Starship and Super Heavy have fully separated.
Starship's stage separation occurred successfully on time, about 2 minutes and 41 seconds after liftoff, before the Super Heavy booster exploded shortly afterward.
"We're going to take that data and improve the hot staging sequence and probably improve the hardware itself for the next flight," SpaceX quality engineering manager Kate Tice said during the live webcast on X. The rocket company is working to be able to soft-land Super Heavy in the Gulf of Mexico to test reentry and landing processes.
Starship upper stage continued flying for a short time after stage separation. SpaceX had hoped to establish signal acquisition with the spacecraft at its target altitude of about 250 kilometers. But telemetry from the vehicle was lost about eight minutes after liftoff, near the end of its own burn after stage separation, with mission managers, including the rocket company's CEO and founder Elon Musk and brother Kimbal, eagerly awaiting updates in the live webcast.
Just north of Boca Chica, on South Padre Island, spectators gathered by the hundreds this morning to watch the launch. They cheered as the orange light from Starship's 33 first-stage Raptor engines blazed through its plume of exhaust as the huge rocket began its climb.
The spacecraft was never expected to reach full orbit around Earth, instead flying on a suborbital trajectory to splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Hawaii. During Saturday's flight test, Starship did fly longer and higher than on IFT-1. The last telemetry signal pegged the spacecraft's altitude at 148 kilometers, well above the 100 km boundary of space.
"We're not targeting orbit today; we're targeting almost orbit," said Siva Bharadvaj, a SpaceX operations engineer, adding that the goal was to "get to a thrust profile similar to what we would need for orbit, but also energy level that the ship would need to dissipate for reentry."
"Honestly, it's such an incredibly successful day even though we did have a rapid unscheduled disassembly of both the Super Heavy booster and the Ship," Tice said. "That's great. We got so much data, and that will all help us to improve for our next flight."
Another good news for SpaceX, the new orbital launch mount at Starbase appeared to withstand Saturday's Starship launch. That was not the case during IFT-1.
SpaceX will have to investigate the causes of today's RUD, and take measures to prevent the same thing from happening again in the future.
Today's launch will hopefully lead to an uptick in launch cadence for the new vehicle, as further refined designs make their way to the launch pad at Starbase. Moving forward, SpaceX may aim to fly Starship test missions as often as once a month, which, if maintained, would go a long way toward certifying the vehicle for crewed launches in time for Artemis 3 moon mission.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket has launched more than once a week, on average, the past few years, and reaching a higher cadence for Starship launches has always been the goal of the company and Musk.
Standing nearly 122 meters tall, Starship is currently the largest and most powerful active rocket. It can be seen for miles when stacked and standing at the Starbase launch pad. The spacecraft is designed to help make humanity an interplanetary species -- a long-held dream of Musk's. He envisions his space vehicle is the one that will allow humanity to establish a sustainable, permanent presence on Mars and beyond.
Starship's Super Heavy booster stands as the evolutionary next step beyond SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.
Falcon 9's first stage and payload fairings are reusable, though reuse usually takes a few weeks at a minimum. The Falcon 9's second stage is not reusable and is disposed of after each flight.
On the other hand, Starship is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. The rocket's launch tower features two massive "chopstick" arms designed to catch Super Heavy as it returns to the launch pad for landing, and also to stack a landed Starship back onto Super Heavy for reflight.
WATCH second integrated test flight of SpaceX Starship