The Spacex spacecraft got out of control while in space during a test flight on Thursday, marking the second launch in a row that the vehicle has encountered a fatal problem on its way to orbit.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) briefly arrested flights to the main airports of Florida and It seems to have diverted others by caution of “space launch debris”. The agency told britcommerce that it demands from Spacex to do what is known as an accident investigation into failure.
The company launched Starship using its super heavy reinforcement and things seemed normal during the first eight minutes of the flight. The ship separated successfully and went to space, while the reinforcement returned to the launch of the company in Texas, where it was caught For the third time for the launch tower.
But about eight minutes and nine seconds on the flight, the Spacex transmission graphics showed that Starship lost multiple Raptor engines in the vehicle. The images on board showed that the ship began to a spiral end on the end on the ocean.
“We have just seen that some engines went out, it seems that we are losing control of the ship’s attitude,” said Spacex’s communications manager, Dan Huot, in the transmission. “At this point we have lost contact with the ship.”
Images Published in social networks showed that the ship broke over the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic to A few minutes later. The company aware to X that “immediately began to coordinate with security officials to implement previously planned contingency responses.”
Consecutive high profile explosions occur when the SPACEX CEO, Elon Musk, has spent the last weeks causing chaos throughout the United States federal government with its government efficiency department. That has been included in FAA employees, which supervises Spacex flights.
Spacex hoped to deploy four fictitious versions of its Starlink satellites during Thursday’s test flight, a step towards using the spacecraft for commercial missions. The company has been developing the spacecraft on purpose by making test flights in rapid succession and learning from the things that go well and incorrect.
But Thursday’s failure occurs only a few weeks after the seventh test flight, which he saw to the spacecraft to break spectacularly over the Turkish and Caicos Islands, which caused FAA to divert a series of flights in that airspace.
Spacex conducted an accident investigation into that failure. The company determined that the propellant was dripping inside the spacecraft, which caused fires and a blackout of communications with the ship before it self -destructs.
Before this test flight, Spacex said he made improvements in the lines that send fuel to Starship engines and changed the propeller temperature. He also added additional vents and “a new purge system” to protect himself better against any leak.
In some of his previous test flights, Spacex saw his spacecraft to break while trying to re -enter the atmosphere of the earth. The company launched changes in the seventh test flight that they were supposed to help you learn to better prepare the ship to survive that re -entry.
“With flight 8, we are focused on finding the limits of the real world of the spacecraft so we can prepare to eventually return the spacecraft to the launch site and catch it,” the company wrote In X on Thursday.
This story has been updated with FAA’s response.