SpaceX’s Starship booster exploded during a test flight at Starbase, Texas, after the company aborted an attempt to catch it during a test flight.
The massive Starship rocket launched successfully, but the booster failed to return to the tower and instead went into the ocean.
The explosion was reportedly intentional.
Via @CSI_Starbase on X:
Per Space.com:
Flight 15 lifted off from SpaceX‘s Starbase facility here in South Texas at 5:47 p.m. ET (2247 GMT; 4:47 p.m. local Texas time). The towering Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage cleared the tower without incident and climbed into the skies under more than 18 million pounds of thrust from the booster’s 33 Raptor 3 engines.
The flight continued nominally through its initial ascent, with the successful execution of Super Heavy’s main engine cutoff and Ship’s subsequent hot-staging — firing its own Raptors during separation from the booster — about 2.5 minutes after launch. Following stage separation, Super Heavy reoriented for a planned return to Starbase as Ship powered its way toward low Earth orbit (LEO).
SpaceX originally planned to catch Super Heavy with the Starbase launch tower’s giant mechanical “chopstick” arms. But it wasn’t to be: The company called off the catch attempt and brought the booster down for a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about 6.5 minutes after launch, for reasons that were not immediately clear.
A successful catch would have been a significant milestone for SpaceX and its efforts to design Starship as a fully and rapidly reusable launch vehicle. It would have been the first successful recovery of a Version 3 (V3) Super Heavy, which SpaceX began flying earlier this year. The company previously recovered three of its V1 Super Heavy vehicles and reused two of those in later flights.
The booster was seen diverting course before detonating over the ocean.
“It looks like it’s not in the right position,” said NBC’s Gadi Schwartz just seconds before the explosion.
WATCH:
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