SpaceX's Starship Breaks Up During Flight Test and Its Falling Debris Affects Flights

 

On Thursday, January 17th, Reuters reported on a SpaceX Starship rocket that disintegrated in space minutes after launch. The incident delayed the aerospace company's CEO Elon Musk's flagship rocket project and created inconveniences for air traffic.

 

The upgraded Starship, which carried a test payload of the first simulated satellite but no staff, lost contact with SpaceX's mission control center at 5:38 p.m. EST (6:38 a.m. on Friday SGT).

 

SpaceX communications manager Dan Huot admitted that the ship had gone missing and hinted that the disintegration may have been due to an anomaly in the upper stage of the ship.

 

This was SpaceX's seventh Starship test since 2023. The test aims to successfully build a rocket capable of transporting humans and cargo to Mars and deploying many satellites into Earth orbit.

 

According to SpaceX's pretest mission description, the Starship whose upper stage is 2 meters taller than previous versions is a next-generation spacecraft with significant upgrades. It was scheduled to make a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean about an hour after launching from Texas, US.

 

Not coincidentally, in March 2024, another Starship also experienced an upper-stage failure. While SpaceX's ship failures hardly caused widespread disruption of aviation in the past, this disintegrated ship does not.

 

Many commercial flights were diverted to other airports or rerouted to avoid the falling pieces of the ship, according to flight logs from the tracking website FlightRadar24. Some flights at Miami International Airport were grounded, according to Reuters.

 

Musk posted a video on X showing the debris field and said success was not certain, but entertainment was.

 

The failure came a day after Amazon $AMZN founder Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin successfully put its giant New Glenn rocket into orbit for the first time.

 

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