Flight 8 launched March 6 from SpaceX's Starbase manufacturing and test facility on the southern tip of Texas. The mission largely mirrored that of Flight 7, during which the both vehicles' first stage Super Heavy boosters successfully rocketed back to Starbase to be caught by the launch tower's "Mechazilla" chopstick-like arms. Ship, however, for both Flight 7 and Flight 8, did not fare as well as its Super Heavy counterpart. (Starship Flight 9 is scheduled to launch on May 27.)
Flight 7 and Flight 8 each ended in dramatic explosions over the Atlantic Ocean that could be seen from Florida, the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos, raining fiery Starship debris into the drink below. Flight 7's Ship encountered a propellant leak and fire in the spacecraft's "attic," leading to its explosion and loss. Side-by-side, Flight 8 followed a very similar trajectory, but instead of a fire in the attic, Starship's last flight suffered a "flash" in what could be comparatively called its "basement," which brought about its blazing demise.
In this case, "basement" is Ship's business end with six powerful Raptor rocket engines. The flight plan for Starship's eighth launch called for Ship to deploy four dummy payloads simulating SpaceX Starlink satellites about 17.5 minutes after liftoff, followed by a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean off of Western Australia roughly 50 minutes later. But it never got the chance to do either, and now we know why.
A "flash" occurred near one of Ship's center, sea-level Raptor engines, followed by an "energetic event" that led to that engine's shutdown, SpaceX said in an update. The two remaining sea-level Raptors immediately terminated their thrust, as well as one of Ship's vacuum-optimized Raptor engines, causing the vehicle to begin tumbling out of control.
Source: www.space.com
No comments:
Post a Comment