Starship spins out of control

Much was riding on Musk rocket launch

- KENNETH CHANG

The latest flight of SpaceX’s Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, got all the way up to space but not all the way back down to Earth.

The upper-stage vehicle coasted through space Tuesday, surpassing flights in January and March that ended in explosions and showers of debris over the Atlantic Ocean. But halfway through its journey, the spacecraft sprang a propellant leak. That caused it to start spinning out of control. The Starship vehicle used in the test flight was not able to survive the intense heat, breaking up as it fell back into the atmosphere.

By design, the debris fell into the Indian Ocean, far from areas inhabited by people.

That suggests SpaceX engineers still have much work to do with Starship, especially the upper-stage vehicle, before the spacecraft can be reused frequently, a necessity for fulfilling the vision of Elon Musk, who founded the company in order to send people to Mars one day.

Several tests that SpaceX planned to perform during the flight, including deploying simulators of the next-generation Starlink satellites and assessing improvements to the vehicle's heat shield, were not performed.

There was nonetheless progress during the flight, the ninth so far, which lifted off from Starbase, Texas, at 7:37 pm Eastern Daylight Time.

The company appears to have fixed the problems that caused the spacecraft to explode during the ascent of the two previous test flights. The mission also flew a booster that had been used for an earlier test flight in January — important progress towards demonstrating a rocket that can be flown over and over.

‘FAIL QUICKLY, FIX QUICKLY’