Another SpaceX Starship rose high and dropped heavily in a fiery blast when it attempted to land upright during a Tuesday test ride.
SN9, the new version of the Starship spacecraft from SpaceX, soared from the company's South Texas base, on the Gulf Coast near the small city of Boca Chica Village, on a test flight today (February 2).
It was the second such blast in December since the last Starship project faced a similar fate.
What Happened To SN9?
The corporation expects that the recycled rocket vehicle will one day bring crew and passengers to the moon, Mars, and beyond, towering at 120 meters (394 feet).
SpaceX principal integration engineer John Insprucker said during SpaceX's launch webcast that they have "just got to work on that landing."
"We got a lot of good data, and the primary objective - to demonstrate control of the vehicle in the subsonic re-entry - looked to be very good, and we will take a lot out of that," he added.
Elon Musk, the company's founder, was uncharacteristically silent on social media, having said he was "off Twitter for a while" the night before.
The SN9 stainless steel rocket was approved by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for lift-off from Boca Chica, Texas, which had already postponed issuing authorization until deciding that SpaceX's last launch exceeded its license conditions.
About 3.30 pm local time, the rocket fired smoothly and steadily shut down its engines when it approached a height of 10 km (six miles), then carried out a sequence of test maneuvers in a horizontal 'belly flop' role.
The issues started as the rocket sought to return to a vertical location for landing, with the video revealing that it came in way too soon and at a lower angle.
It landed and burst into brilliant orange flames and a cloud of smoke with a loud smash, but the fire did not spread.
On Tuesday, the flight was postponed by some days over concerns arising from the last Starship test of SpaceX on December 9, which also went up in flames.
SpaceX had, at least for this launch, the approval of the FAA.
What Can FAA Say About This Mishap?
The Federal Aviation Administration, which controls rocket tests, confirmed on Tuesday evening that it would make an investigation into why the prototype crashed.
"Although this was an uncrewed test flight, the investigation will identify the root cause of today's mishap, and possible opportunities to [enhance safety further] as the program develops," a spokeswoman for the organization said in a release, per New York Times.
SpaceX had requested a permit to surpass Starship SN8's overall acceptable danger to the public. The FAA rejected the proposal, but anyway, SpaceX moved on, putting the business in hot water.
Last week, SpaceX and government regulators seemed to be in a bizarre confrontation. The propellant tanks of this Starship prototype, its eighth, were loaded with SpaceX and looked ready for flight. But still, since no FAA permission had come, the rocket sat on the ground.
The FAA gave authorization for Tuesday's launch late on Monday but then announced that the December launch had happened without approval from the department. Even they have not proven that a pressure wave that an explosion could produce during the test would not pose a danger to the public, SpaceX had demanded a waiver to perform the trip. The FAA rejected the appeal, SpaceX ignored the decision and started anyway.
Even if Starship had landed perfectly, it was an infringement of the company's license to start it without permission.
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