SpaceX launches Starship again after 2 failures, but rocket spins out of control | Video

After consecutive explosions, SpaceX launched its colossal rocket Starship once again on Tuesday evening, but failed to achieve its primary goals as the spacecraft lost control and broke apart. The 403-foot (123-metre) rocket took off on its ninth demonstration flight from Starbase, SpaceX’s launch facility located at the southern tip of Texas. Earlier this month, residents voted to establish the area as an official city.

CEO Elon Musk’s SpaceX had planned to deploy a series of mock satellites after liftoff, but this was cancelled when the door failed to open fully. Shortly afterwards, the spacecraft began to spin as it skimmed through space, heading for an uncontrolled landing in the Indian Ocean.

SpaceX later confirmed the spacecraft underwent “a rapid unscheduled disassembly,” essentially bursting apart. “Teams will continue to review data and work toward our next flight test,” the company stated online.

This marked the first occasion one of Musk’s Starships — designed for missions to the Moon and Mars — flew with a reused booster. Unlike previous tests, there were no plans to recover the booster with giant mechanical arms at the launch site. Contact with the booster was lost during flight, and it crashed into the Gulf of Mexico in fragments, while the spacecraft proceeded towards the Indian Ocean.

The spacecraft then lost control, apparently due to fuel leaks.

“Not looking great with a lot of our on-orbit objectives for today,” said SpaceX flight commentator Dan Huot. The company had hoped to test the spacecraft’s heat shield during a controlled re-entry.

The flight was expected to conclude with the rocket “plunging into the Indian Ocean,” thousands of miles from its launch site at Starbase, Texas — a move designed to simulate real-world mission conditions.

A video showed the rocket lifting off from the launch tower into the early evening sky. The Super Heavy booster’s many powerful Raptor engines fired up, creating a big flame and lots of smoke and steam.

For the first time, SpaceX used a Super Heavy booster that had flown before, trying to show that the rocket parts can be reused.

As expected, the first part of the rocket, which is 232 feet (71 meters) tall, separated from the Starship spacecraft a few minutes after launch and started falling back toward Earth.

But SpaceX lost contact with the booster while it was coming down, and it probably crashed into the ocean instead of landing gently like they planned.

The upper part of the Starship rocket kept going up and reached its planned path just outside Earth’s atmosphere about nine minutes after launch.

During the test, there was a problem when Starship’s payload doors didn’t open to release a set of fake satellites.

The plan was for Starship to finish its test flight, which would last less than 90 minutes, by coming back down safely and landing in the Indian Ocean.

But around 30 minutes after launch, SpaceX said their flight team lost control of Starship’s position, and the rocket started spinning as it came back into the atmosphere.

"We will not be aligned as we wanted it to be aligned for re-entry," a SpaceX commentator said during the livestream. "Our chances of making it all the way down are pretty slim."

Its last two test flights - in January and March - were cut short moments after liftoff as the vehicle blew to pieces on its ascent, raining debris over parts of the Caribbean and disrupting scores of commercial airline flights in the region.