The company SpaceX finally launched its eighth proof flight of the Starshipthe largest and most powerful rocket in the world, but shortly after he lost contact with the ship, as confirmed shortly after the company of Elon Musk.
“Spacex confirms that the upper stage of the Starship ship for flight 8 was lost after losing the engines and tide control about 20 seconds before completing its ascent”, Said in his X account and added that they will soon begin an investigation into what happened, which seems to remember a similar failure that condemned the space vehicle Flight 7 of SpaceX In January.
He explained that during the rise of Starship the vehicle suffered “A quick and unforeseen disassembly and contact was lost. Our team immediately began to coordinate with security officials to implement previously planned contingency responses”.
The incident occurred shortly after the two parts of the ship were separated and that the Super Heavy that drives it, will return successfully to its base in Texas for the third time in these tests, in the midst of the public applause that came to witness the event.
This Thursday’s incident occurs after this test has been canceled three times – initially planned for February 28 – one of them last Monday for technical reasons and that a ship exploded last January and the pieces spread through the Caribbean, after which the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA, acronym in English) began an investigation.
However, Spacex had the approval of the FAA to do this new test, in the midst of the investigation.
“We saw that several of the engines began to stand. Once enough central engines are lost, attitude control is lost. And then we saw that the ship began to turn and, at that time, we lost contact with the ship“, said Dan Huot of Spacex communications that made the transmission next to the engineer Kathy Tice.
“Obviously, there is much to analyze, much to investigate and we will do it immediately”Huot also said during the live comments of the launch. “We have much more to learn about this vehicle”He said.
The ship took off at 18:30 local time (23:30 GMT) driven by the super heavy from the Spacex base in Boca girl in southern Texas, on the border with Mexico.