A successful liftoff and staging is followed by an explosion of the spent first stage and then, minutes later, the second stage.
SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket reached space for the first time Saturday morning but didn’t stay there for long.
The 397-foot-tall rocket successfully lifted off from SpaceX’s Starbase facility at Boca Chica, Texas, at 7:03 a.m. Central time, all 33 of its Raptor first-stage engines burning, and completed a tricky “hot staging” sequence in which the second stage’s Raptors lit before stage separation.
But after the second stage neared its own engine cutoff, at 14,990 miles an hour and 92 miles up, it vanished from the livestream broadcast on X, formerly Twitter, and from SpaceX’s telemetry.
“We think we may have lost the second stage,” SpaceX engineer and launch commentator John Insprucker said on the livestream. He added a minute or so later after getting further updates: “What we do believe right now is that the automated flight termination system on second stage appears to have triggered very late in the burn.”
Why that happened remains unclear.
Starship’s first stage saw its own “rapid unscheduled disassembly” shortly after staging—a process that had Starship’s six second-stage Raptors exhaust through a vented interstage ring before cutting the booster loose. The video showed the first stage gently falling away, with a subset of its engines reigniting, but then it exploded moments later after all of those engines blinked out.
That terminated plans to fly the booster to a controlled soft landing on the ocean to test its reusability, a key part of the Starship design for rapid reflight of this launch system.
