By Michael Sheetz - CNBC
SpaceX, the space company of the richest person on the planet, Elon Musk, launched on Saturday its second test flight of the Starship spacecraft, with which it plans to one day be able to fly to Mars.
The liftoff occurred minutes after 8 a.m. ET at its base near Boca Chica, on the Texas-Mexico border and by the sea.
The unmanned spacecraft flew for more than seven minutes and managed to successfully separate from its booster, completing several phases before an emergency system inside the rocket destroyed it when contact with the ground operating base was lost.
Liftoff from SpaceX's Starship in Boca Chica, Texas, on Nov. 18, 2023.Eric Gay/AP
"We have lost the data from the second stage [...] what we believe now is that the Automated Flight Termination System on the second stage appears to have been activated very late in the burn," said John Insprucker, SpaceX's principal integration engineer.
The flight termination system is a standard safety mechanism on rockets that destroys them if a problem arises or they deviate from their trajectory. According to the SpaceX liftoff webcast, Starship appears to have exploded at an altitude of 148 kilometers (about 485,000 feet). That's a little less than half the altitude at which the International Space Station orbits.
After reaching space, Starship was scheduled to fly most of an orbit around Earth before re-entering the atmosphere and landing off the coast of Kauai in Hawaii.
"An incredibly successful day, even though we had a rapid unscheduled disassembly of the Super Heavy booster and the spacecraft," said SpaceX director of quality engineering Kate Tice.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson congratulated the company for making "progress in the flight test." "Spaceflight is a bold adventure that demands a positive spirit and bold innovation. Today's test is an opportunity to learn and then fly again," Nelson said in a social media post.
SpaceX first launched its full Starship rocket system in April. Although that flight did not reach space, it achieved several historic milestones for an experimental rocket of unprecedented scale. The destruction of the rocket in mid-air, followed by an investigation into possible damage on the ground, triggered a regulatory review that lasted nearly seven months.
The tallest and most powerful rocket ever launched
Starship is the tallest and most powerful rocket ever launched into space: completely stacked on top of the Super Heavy booster, Starship is 397 feet tall and about 30 feet in diameter.
The Super Heavy booster, which stands 232 feet tall, is what starts the rocket's journey into space. At its base are 33 Raptor engines, producing 16.7 million pounds of thrust, about double the 8.8 million pounds of NASA's Space Launch System rocket, which first launched late last year.
The 165-foot-tall Starship has six other Raptor engines: three for use in the atmosphere and three for operating in a vacuum.
The rocket runs on liquid oxygen and methane and requires more than 10 million pounds of fuel to launch.
The Starship system is designed to be fully reusable and aims to become a new method of transporting cargo and people beyond Earth. The rocket is also key to NASA's plan to return astronauts to the moon.
SpaceX won a multimillion-dollar contract from the space administration to use Starship as a crewed lunar lander as part of NASA's Artemis lunar program.
Musk has said he expects the company to spend about $2 billion on Starship development this year.
Goals for this second flight
SpaceX has emphasized that it plans to fly hundreds of Starship missions before the launch of a crewed rocket. On this occasion, it sought to surpass the almost four minutes of flight time of the first launch, reach space and demonstrate that improvements in its terrestrial infrastructure mitigate the damage in the initial flight.
At the April launch, SpaceX fired only 30 of the 33 Raptor engines at the base of the Super Heavy booster. Other engines were lost mid-flight. In addition, a communications problem caused an unexpected delay in the activation of the rocket's autonomous flight termination system, which destroys the vehicle should it deviate from its trajectory.
SpaceX made improvements to the launch pad infrastructure, as well as the design of the rocket for this attempt.