Cosmic Log
For the second time in a row, SpaceX lost the second stage of its Starship launch system during a flight test, while recovering the first-stage Super Heavy booster.
Today’s eighth Starship flight test came a month and a half after a similarly less-than-perfect mission that sparked an investigation.
“The primary reason we do these flight tests is to learn,” SpaceX launch commentator Dan Huot said. “We have some more to learn about this vehicle.”
SpaceX’s seventh flight test of its massive Starship launch system brought good news as well as not-so-great news.
The good news? The Super Heavy booster successfully flew itself back to the Texas launch site and was caught above the ground by the launch tower’s chopstick-style mechanical arms. That’s only the second “Mechazilla” catch to be done during the Starship test program.
The bad news is that the upper stage, known as Ship 33, was lost during its ascent.
“Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn. Teams will continue to review data from today’s flight test to better understand root cause,” SpaceX said in a post-mission posting to X. “With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will help us improve Starship’s reliability.”
T-Mobile has opened up direct-to-cellular emergency texting over SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network on a temporary basis in areas affected by this week’s catastrophic wildfires in the Los Angeles area.
In a news release, Bellevue, Wash.-based T-Mobile said the satellite service can be used to send texts to loved ones, deliver wireless emergency alerts and enable 911 texting. “While SpaceX’s direct-to-cell constellation has not been fully deployed, we are once again temporarily making this early test version available for those who need it the most,” T-Mobile said.
John Saw, T-Mobile’s chief technology officer, pointed out in a posting to the X social-media platform that the system should work even in areas without commercial power or terrestrial cell coverage.
Satellite texting could be a lifesaver in areas of the wildfire zone where cell towers have been knocked out of service. “Can’t burn down a tower when there is no tower,” Ben Longmier, SpaceX’s senior director of satellite engineering, said on X.
SpaceX’s Starship launch system went through its sixth flight test today, and although the Super Heavy booster missed out on being caught back at its launch pad, the mission checked off a key test objective with President-elect Donald Trump in the audience.
Trump attended the launch at SpaceX’s Starbase complex in the company of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who has been serving as a close adviser to the once and future president over the past few months. In a pre-launch posting to his Truth Social media platform, Trump wished good luck to “Elon Musk and the Great Patriots involved in this incredible project.”
NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft today began its six-year cruise to the Jupiter system, with the goal of determining whether one of the giant planet’s moons has the right stuff in the right setting for life.
The van-sized probe was sent into space from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at 12:06 p.m. ET (9:06 a.m. PT). A little more than an hour after launch, the spacecraft separated from its launch vehicle to begin a roundabout journey of 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometers) from Earth orbit to Europa.
For decades, scientists have been collecting evidence that Europa harbors a hidden ocean of salty water beneath its icy shell. Or are they hidden lakes? Europa Clipper is built to characterize the moon’s surface, and what’s beneath that surface, to an unprecedented degree.
For the first time ever, SpaceX has followed through on a Starship test launch by bringing back the Super Heavy booster for an on-target catch in the arms of its “Mechazilla” launch-tower cradle in Texas.
“This is a day for the engineering history books,” SpaceX launch commentator Kate Tice said.
Today’s successful catch marks a giant step toward using — and reusing — Starship for missions ranging from satellite deployments to NASA’s moon missions to migrations to Mars.
Tesla’s Cybertruck may look ungainly on Earth, but a pressurized version of the vehicle might be just the thing for gathering up samples of Martian rock and soil for return to Earth. That’s one of the way-out concepts that was discussed in Seattle during the past week’s convention of the Mars Society, a nonprofit advocacy group.
Robotically controlled Cybertrucks could be part of a Mars exploration system that also includes SpaceX’s Starship super-rocket as well as spaceworthy versions of all-terrain vehicles and humanoid robots built by Tesla, according to mission plans suggested by Mars Society co-founder Robert Zubrin, retired NASA engineer Tony Muscatello and business analyst Kent Nebergall.
Zubrin said the Starship-based concept could even accelerate progress toward crewed missions to Mars.
“We use Starship to deliver a robotic expedition that has already examined thousands of samples on Mars, gathered from hundreds of kilometers away by helicopters, and tens of kilometers away gathered by rovers, and then we land the crew to do follow-up exploration, including drilling in well-characterized sites to bring up water and see what the life on Mars is,” he said during an Aug. 8 session.
How way out is that? It sounds like science fiction, but theoretically, at least some elements of the plan could show up in SpaceX’s proposal for reworking NASA’s Mars sample return strategy.
Continuing concerns about the thruster system on Boeing’s Starliner space capsule may lead NASA to decide against letting astronauts take the craft back down to Earth from the International Space Station, mission managers said today.
In such a scenario, the two astronauts who rode to the ISS in Starliner for the capsule’s first crewed test mission in June would fly back down in a SpaceX Dragon capsule next February.
“We haven’t approved this plan,” Steve Stich, program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, told journalists during a teleconference. “In other words, we’ve done all the work to make sure this plan is there.”
Going ahead with the contingency plan would require shuffling arrangements for the next crew that’s due to take a Dragon to the ISS, known as Crew-9.
That crew would be cut back from four to two astronauts. Starliner’s test pilots, Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams, would remain on the station for Crew-9’s tour of duty and return to Earth with Crew-9 as part of the regular rotation.
This week NASA pushed back Crew-9’s scheduled launch to no earlier than Sept. 24 to accommodate potential changes. Because of the parking arrangements at the station, the Starliner capsule would have to undock from the station before the Crew-9 launch and make an uncrewed, robotically controlled descent and landing.
SpaceX is flying again after the Federal Aviation Administration ruled that the company can resume Falcon 9 rocket launches while the investigation into a failed July 11 mission continues.
The FAA’s go-ahead came on July 25 after SpaceX reported that the failure was caused by a crack in a sense line for a pressure sensor attached to the upper stage’s liquid-oxygen system. That resulted in an oxygen leak that degraded the performance of the upper-stage engine. As a near-term fix, SpaceX is removing the sense line and the sensors for upcoming Falcon 9 launches.
It didn’t take long for SpaceX to get back to its flight schedule. The company launched a Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1:45 a.m. ET July 27 (10:45 p.m. PT July 26). Like the July 11 mission, this one sent a batch of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit.
The launch appeared to proceed without incident. After stage separation, the first-stage booster descended to a landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean, while the second stage proceeded to orbit and deployed 23 satellites for the Starlink high-speed internet network.
After going eight years and more than 300 launches without a failure, SpaceX had a Falcon 9 rocket launch go awry, resulting in the expected loss of 20 Starlink satellites.
The Federal Aviation Administration said it would oversee an investigation into the anomaly, raising the prospect that dozens of launches could be delayed until the problem is identified and rectified. Update for July 27: SpaceX was able to resume Falcon 9 launches after the FAA ruled that no public safety issues were involved in the anomaly.
As many as 40 Falcon 9 launches are on tap between now and the end of the year — potentially including missions that would carry astronauts to the International Space Station and send the privately funded Polaris Dawn crew into orbit for the world’s first commercial spacewalk.