• Forum
• SITREP
• Military
• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security

• Space

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• Public Eye

SpaceX Starship Flight 3

SpaceX successfully carried out the longest test flight of its massive Starship rocket, but it disintegrated on its return to Earth. The vehicle was destroyed while approaching its landing point in the Indian Ocean. The test flight was the third for Musk and SpaceX, and its Starship rocket travelled halfway around the Earth before it re-entered the atmosphere. The rocket, which consists of a spacecraft also called Starship, and a rocket booster known as the Super Heavy took off from SpaceX’s private Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas, at 8:25am (13:25 GMT). Starship went on to accomplish several major milestones and firsts:

• For the second time, all 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy Booster started up successfully and completed a full-duration burn during ascent.
• Starship executed its second successful hot-stage separation, powering down all but three of Super Heavy’s Raptor engines and successfully igniting the six second stage Raptor engines before separating the vehicles.
• Following separation, the Super Heavy booster successfully completed its flip maneuver and completed a full boostback burn to send it towards its splashdown point in the Gulf of Mexico.
• Super Heavy successfully lit several engines for its first ever landing burn before the vehicle experienced a RUD (that’s SpaceX-speak for “rapid unscheduled disassembly”). The most likely root cause for the early boostback burn shutdown was determined to be continued filter blockage where liquid oxygen is supplied to the engines, leading to a loss of inlet pressure in engine oxygen turbopumps. SpaceX implemented hardware changes ahead of Flight 3 to mitigate this issue, which resulted in the booster progressing to its first ever landing burn attempt. Super Heavy boosters for Flight 4 and beyond will get additional hardware inside oxygen tanks to further improve propellant filtration capabilities. And utilizing data gathered from Super Heavy’s first ever landing burn attempt, additional hardware and software changes are being implemented to increase startup reliability of the Raptor engines in landing conditions. The booster then continued to descend until attempting its landing burn, which commands the same 13 engines used during boostback to perform the planned final slowing for the rocket before a soft touchdown in the water, but the six engines that shut down early in the boostback burn were disabled from attempting the landing burn startup, leaving seven engines commanded to start up with two successfully reaching mainstage ignition. The booster’s flight concluded at approximately 462 meters in altitude and just under seven minutes into the mission. The booster had lower than expected landing burn thrust when contact was lost.
• Starship's six second stage Raptor engines all started successfully and powered the vehicle to its expected orbit, becoming the first Starship to complete its full-duration ascent burn.
• While coasting, Starship accomplished several of the flight test’s additional objectives, including the opening and closing of its payload door (aka the pez dispenser,) and initiating a propellant transfer demonstration. The vehicle successfully completed a propellant transfer demonstration, moving liquid oxygen from a header tank into the main tank. This test provided valuable data for eventual ship-to-ship propellant transfers that will enable missions like returning astronauts to the Moon under NASA’s Artemis program. Starship did not attempt its planned on-orbit relight of a single Raptor engine due to vehicle roll rates during coast. Results from these demonstrations will come after postflight data review is complete.
• Several minutes after Starship began its coast phase, the vehicle began losing the ability to control its attitude. Starship continued flying its nominal trajectory but given the loss of attitude control, the vehicle automatically triggered a pre-planned command to skip its planned on-orbit relight of a single Raptor engine.
• Starship went on to experience its first ever entry from space, providing valuable data on heating and vehicle control during hypersonic reentry. The lack of attitude control resulted in an off-nominal entry, with the ship seeing much larger than anticipated heating on both protected and unprotected areas. High-definition live views of entry and a considerable amount of telemetry were successfully transmitted in real time by Starlink terminals operating on Starship. The flight test’s conclusion came when telemetry was lost at approximately 65 kilometers in altitude, roughly 49 minutes into the mission. The most likely root cause of the unplanned roll was determined to be clogging of the valves responsible for roll control. SpaceX has since added additional roll control thrusters on upcoming Starships to improve attitude control redundancy and upgraded hardware for improved resilience to blockage.
• The flight test’s conclusion came during entry, with the last telemetry signals received via Starlink from Starship at approximately 49 minutes into the mission.

These accomplishments had the potential to revolutionise space transportation and support NASA’s mission to send astronauts back to the moon, analysts said.

Forty-five minutes after the launch, Starship started its descent into Earth’s atmosphere, heading towards splashdown in the Indian Ocean. Starship reached an altitude of more than 200km (125 miles) as it coasted across the Atlantic and South Africa before approaching the Indian Ocean.

At about the 49-minute mark, communication with Starship ended, and SpaceX confirmed that the rocket had not survived re-entry, likely disintegrating and descending into the ocean. According to Musk, SpaceX’s CEO, one of the objectives of these initial flights was to get Starship to orbital velocities, which are about 28,000 kilometres per hour (17,500 miles per hour). Starship hit its orbital speed target goal. This particular flight was not, by design, intended to make it all the way around the Earth. The ascent was smooth.

Following the flight test, SpaceX led the investigation efforts with oversight from the FAA and participation from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB). During Flight 3, neither vehicle’s automated flight safety system was triggered, and no vehicle debris impacted outside of pre-defined hazard areas. Pending FAA finding of no public safety impact, a license modification for the next flight can be issued without formal closure of the mishap investigation.

Upgrades derived from the flight test will debut on the next launch from Starbase on Flight 4, as we turn our focus from achieving orbit to demonstrating the ability to return and reuse Starship and Super Heavy. The team incorporated numerous hardware and software improvements in addition to operational changes including the jettison of the Super Heavy’s hot-stage adapter following boostback to reduce booster mass for the final phase of flight.

The third flight of Starship provided a glimpse through brilliant plasma of a rapidly reusable future on the horizon. We’re continuing to rapidly develop Starship, putting flight hardware in a flight environment to learn as quickly as possible as we build a fully reusable transportation system designed to carry crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars and beyond.

SpaceX aims to make both the vehicle’s lower rocket booster and the upper spacecraft stage capable of flying over and over again. The reusability provides SpaceX with the opportunity to reduce the costs of launching satellites as well as transporting people and the necessary resources for sustaining life in space.

“With each flight test, SpaceX attempts increasingly ambitious objectives for Starship to learn as much as possible for future mission systems development. The ability to test key systems and processes in flight scenarios like these integrated tests allows both NASA and SpaceX to gather crucial data needed for the continued development of Starship HLS,” said Lisa Watson-Morgan, programme manager for the Human Landing System project at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

As part of NASA’s Artemis campaign to return humans to the Moon for the benefit of all, the agency is working with SpaceX to develop the company’s Starship human landing system (HLS), which will land astronauts near the Moon’s South Pole during the Artemis III and Artemis IV missions. On March 14, SpaceX launched the third integrated flight test of its Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage, an important milestone toward providing NASA with a Starship HLS for its Artemis missions.

A complement of 33 Raptor engines, fueled by super-cooled liquid methane and liquid oxygen, powered the Super Heavy booster with Starship stacked on top, from the company’s Starbase orbital launch pad at 8:25 a.m. CDT. Starship, using six Raptor engines, separated from the Super Heavy booster employing a hot-staging technique to fire the engines before separation at approximately three minutes into the flight, in accordance with the flight plan. This was the third flight test of the integrated Super Heavy-Starship system.

“With each flight test, SpaceX attempts increasingly ambitious objectives for Starship to learn as much as possible for future mission systems development. The ability to test key systems and processes in flight scenarios like these integrated tests allows both NASA and SpaceX to gather crucial data needed for the continued development of Starship HLS,” said Lisa Watson-Morgan, HLS Program Manager at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

This test accomplished several important firsts that will contribute to the development of Starship for Artemis lunar landing missions. The spacecraft reached its expected orbit and Starship completed the full-duration ascent burn.

One objective closely tied to future Artemis operations is the transfer of thousands of pounds of cryogenic propellant between internal tanks during the spacecraft’s coast phase as part of NASA’s Space Technology Missions Directorate 2020 Tipping Point awards. The propellant transfer demonstration operations were completed, and the NASA-SpaceX team is currently reviewing the flight data that was received. This Tipping Point technology demonstration is one of more than 20 development activities NASA is undertaking to solve the challenges of using cryogenic fluids during future missions.

As a key step toward understanding how super-cooled propellant sloshes within the tanks when the engines shut down, and how that movement affects Starship’s stability while in orbit, engineers will study flight test data to assess the performance of thrusters that control Starship’s orientation in space. They are also interested to learn more about how the fluid’s movement within the tanks can be settled to maximize propellant transfer efficiency and ensure Raptor engines receive needed propellant conditions to support restart in orbit.

“Storing and transferring cryogenic propellant in orbit has never been attempted on this scale before,” said Jeremy Kenny, project manager, NASA’s Cryogenic Fluid Management Portfolio at Marshall. “But this is a game-changing technology that must be developed and matured for science and exploration missions at the Moon, Mars, and those that will venture even deeper into our solar system.”

Under NASA’s Artemis campaign, the agency will land the first woman, first person of color, and its first international partner astronaut on the lunar surface and prepare for human expeditions to Mars. Commercial human landing systems are critical to deep space exploration, along with the Space Launch System rocket, Orion spacecraft, advanced spacesuits and rovers, exploration ground systems, and the Gateway space station.