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WATCH: Starship’s Seventh Flight Test Has Success With Launch, But Spacecraft Blows Up Nearing Space

By  //  January 16, 2025

coverage of the launch can be seen on Space Coast Daily TV

WATCH: Starship’s Seventh Flight Test Has Success With Launch, But Spacecraft Blows Up Nearing Space

TEXAS – SpaceX launched its colossal Super Heavy-Starship rocket on its seventh test flight Thursday, achieving a significant milestone by successfully “catching” the first-stage booster back at its launch tower. However, the mission faced a setback when the new-generation Starship upper-stage spacecraft was lost, seemingly breaking apart as it approached space.

Starship’s telemetry signal cut off eight minutes and 27 seconds into the flight due to unexpected engine shutdowns or failures.

SpaceX later confirmed the spacecraft’s destruction in a post on X, using a lighthearted tone to acknowledge the incident while emphasizing the value of the test data collected.

The flight test launched a new generation ship with significant upgrades, attempted Starship’s first payload deployment test, flew multiple reentry experiments geared towards ship catch and reuse, and launched and returned the Super Heavy booster.

A block of planned upgrades to the Starship upper stage debuted on this flight test, bringing major improvements to reliability and performance.

The vehicle’s forward flaps were reduced in size and shifted towards the vehicle tip and away from the heat shield, significantly reducing their exposure to reentry heating while simplifying the underlying mechanisms and protective tiling.

Redesigns to the propulsion system, including a 25 percent increase in propellant volume, the vacuum jacketing of feedlines, a new fuel feedline system for the vehicle’s Raptor vacuum engines, and an improved propulsion avionics module controlling vehicle valves and reading sensors, added additional vehicle performance and the ability to fly longer missions.

The ship’s heat shield used the latest generation tiles and included a backup layer to protect from missing or damaged tiles.

The vehicle’s avionics underwent a complete redesign, adding additional capability and redundancy for increasingly complex missions like propellant transfer and ship return to the launch site.

Avionics upgrades included a more powerful flight computer, integrated antennas that combined Starlink, GNSS, and backup RF communication functions into each unit, redesigned inertial navigation and star tracking sensors, integrated smart batteries and power units that distributed data and 2.7MW of power across the ship to 24 high-voltage actuators, and an increase to more than 30 vehicle cameras that gave engineers insight into hardware performance across the vehicle during flight.

With Starlink, the vehicle was capable of streaming more than 120 Mbps of real-time high-definition video and telemetry in every phase of flight, providing invaluable engineering data to rapidly iterate across all systems.

While in space, Starship deployed 10 Starlink simulators, similar in size and weight to next-generation Starlink satellites, as the first exercise of a satellite deploy mission.

The Starlink simulators were on the same suborbital trajectory as Starship, with splashdown targeted in the Indian Ocean. A relight of a single Raptor engine while in space was also planned.

The flight test included several experiments focused on ship return to the launch site and catch. On Starship’s upper stage, a significant number of tiles were removed to stress-test vulnerable areas across the vehicle.

Multiple metallic tile options, including one with active cooling, tested alternative materials for protecting Starship during reentry.

On the sides of the vehicle, non-structural versions of ship catch fittings were installed to test the fittings’ thermal performance, along with a smoothed and tapered edge of the tile line to address hot spots observed during reentry on Starship’s sixth flight test. The ship’s reentry profile was designed to intentionally stress the structural limits of the flaps while at the point of maximum entry dynamic pressure.

Finally, several radar sensors were tested on the tower chopsticks with the goal of increasing the accuracy when measuring distances between the chopsticks and a returning vehicle during catch.

The Super Heavy booster utilized flight-proven hardware for the first time, reusing a Raptor engine from the booster launched and returned on Starship’s fifth flight test.

Hardware upgrades to the launch and catch tower increased reliability for booster catch, including protections to the sensors on the tower chopsticks that were damaged at launch and resulted in the booster offshore divert on Starship’s previous flight test.

Distinct vehicle and pad criteria had to be met prior to a return and catch of the Super Heavy booster, requiring healthy systems on the booster and tower and a final manual command from the mission’s Flight Director.

If this command was not sent prior to the completion of the boostback burn, or if automated health checks showed unacceptable conditions with Super Heavy or the tower, the booster defaulted to a trajectory that took it to a landing burn and soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. The team accepted no compromises when it came to ensuring the safety of the public and their team, and the return only took place if conditions were right.

The returning booster slowed down from supersonic speeds, resulting in audible sonic booms in the area around the landing zone.

Generally, the only impact to those in the surrounding area of a sonic boom was the brief thunder-like noise, with variables like weather and distance from the return site determining the magnitude experienced by observers.

This year marked a transformational period for Starship, with the goal of bringing reuse of the entire system online and flying increasingly ambitious missions as progress continued towards sending humans and cargo to Earth orbit, the Moon, and Mars.