SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft tumbled and exploded in space on Thursday minutes after lifting off from Texas, dooming an attempt to deploy mock satellites in the second consecutive failure this year for Elon Musk’s Mars rocket program.
Several videos on social media showed fiery debris streaking through the dusk skies near south Florida and the Bahamas after Starship’s breakup in space, which occurred shortly after it began to spin uncontrollably with its engines cutoff, a SpaceX live stream of the mission showed.
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The failure of the test flight prompted numerous flight diversions around Turks and Caicos and temporary ground stops at four Florida airports.
The Federal Aviation Administration issued ground stops for flights departing for Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Orlando and Palm Beach airports for more than an hour before resuming normal operations at around 8 p.m. ET (0100 GMT on Friday).
Departures at those airports were delayed by an average of 45 minutes due to the SpaceX incident, the FAA said.
During the event, the FAA activated a debris response area “and briefly slowed aircraft outside the area where space vehicle debris was falling or stopped aircraft at their departure location. Normal operations have resumed.”
The FAA also said it is requiring SpaceX to perform a mishap investigation into the loss of the Starship vehicle.
The failure comes just over a month after the company’s seventh Starship flight also ended in an explosive failure. The back-to-back mishaps occurred in early mission phases that SpaceX has easily surpassed previously, indicating serious setbacks for a program Musk has sought to speed up this year.
The 403-foot (123-meter) rocket system had lifted off at about 6:30 p.m. ET (2330 GMT) from SpaceX’s sprawling Boca Chica, Texas, rocket facilities, with its Super Heavy first stage booster returning back to land as planned.
But minutes later, SpaceX’s live stream showed the Starship upper stage spinning in space, while a visualization of the rocket’s engines showed multiple engines shut down before the company confirmed it had lost contact with the ship.
“Unfortunately, this happened last time too, so we’ve got some practice now,” SpaceX spokesman Dan Huot said on the live stream.
It was not immediately clear whether the explosion was caused by SpaceX’s automated flight termination system, which triggers when something on the rocket goes wrong. The ship showed signs of failure before its explosion.
“During Starship’s ascent burn, the vehicle experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly and contact was lost,” SpaceX said in a statement. “Our team immediately began coordination with safety officials to implement pre-planned contingency responses.”
The Starship failure in January ended eight minutes into flight when the rocket exploded in space, raining debris over Caribbean islands and causing minor damage to a car in the Turks and Caicos Islands.
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