Today, after several delays (including the replacement of one of the engines) at 16:00 Moscow time, SpaceX launched for the fourth time a prototype of its reusable Starship spacecraft to an altitude of 10 km. SN11 was launched in dense fog, so visibility was difficult. One thing is clear: the rocket again failed to land successfully and exploded epically on landing.

At the same time, small fragments of SN11 even flew to the cameras of outside observers, located at a distance of about 200 meters from the explosion site. On the recordings from these cameras, in fact, nothing was visible due to the weather conditions. According to the official broadcast, the rocket successfully launched, climbed to a predetermined altitude of 10 km, after which it turned off the engines and performed the usual landing maneuver. At an altitude of about 1 km above the ground, its engines lit up again, and the broadcast was turned off – the prototype could not sit down successfully.

Elon Musk commented on the incident in a familiar ironic manner: “At least the funnel is in the right place!”… The executive also said that the new Starship prototypes are being produced at a high speed, and this solves many problems. “It looks like engine # 2 had trouble lifting and didn’t reach chamber operating pressure on landing, but in theory it wasn’t necessary. Something important happened shortly after the engines were turned on during landing. HUt later today we we will be able to study the details and understand the reason that it was “, – he noted.

SpaceX’s chief integration engineer, John Insprucker, noted that thick fog in the area prevented the company from displaying images from cameras other than those on the rocket itself. “The frozen video that we saw in the camera does not mean that we are waiting for the signal to return – Starship 11 will no longer turn on. Don’t wait for the landing – he said. – It looks like we have lost all the data from the car, and the team, of course, is away from the landing site, so we will be there to see what happened. “

By the way, yesterday the launch of Starship SN11 from the Starbase test site near the village of Boca Chica in South Texas did not take place because the inspector of the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which oversees commercial space launches, could not get to the launch pad in time, as reported by the executive Director of SpaceX. As a result, the start was postponed by a day.

Yesterday’s photo of the Starship SN11 prototype at the launch pad

Earlier, Elon Musk said that many changes were made to SN11 in order to correct the shortcomings identified during previous tests. On March 3, SpaceX launched its Starship SN10 spacecraft to an altitude of 10 kilometers and managed to land the car, although the rocket exploded a few minutes after landing. SN10 exploded after landing because the engines ran out of power as a result of helium leaking from the fuel tank. This mission followed two other launches of Starship SN8 and SN9 to the same altitude – the prototypes were able to take off and perform the required maneuvers, but they crashed on landing. By the way, not so long ago we saw a prototype of the first Super Heavy stage – BN1 (“Accelerator number 1”) assembled.