SpaceX's Spacecraft Makes It to Space, but Then Tumbles

Dow Jones
28 May

The bumpy ride continued for Elon Musk's 400-foot-tall rocket and spacecraft.

SpaceX launched the latest flight test for its Starship vehicle at around 7:30 p.m. ET Tuesday, but fell short of carrying out planned experiments. The company had looked to complete a fuller mission than in the previous two test flights conducted this year. Both of them ended in abrupt explosions of Starship spacecraft, the debris briefly halting flights in parts of the Caribbean.

Destiny Tech100 Inc fell 5% in overnight trading.

On Tuesday's mission, the spacecraft flew much farther, and was able to make it into space. There it ran into problems. It wasn't able to deploy satellite simulators out of a door, an operation designed to help advance the vehicle toward one day deploying SpaceX Starlink satellites.

The company later lost control of the vehicle, which began to tumble and spin. SpaceX had planned to conduct tests during its re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, where it would face intense heat and forces, but it wasn't able to get that far.

SpaceX planned for the spacecraft to come down in the Indian Ocean. Despite the vehicle's problems, it was still expected to re-enter there, according to SpaceX's livestream of the flight.

The Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates private space launches, said it hadn't received any reports of injuries to members of the public, or damage to public property.

In a post on X, the company said the spacecraft came apart. Musk said on X after the flight ended that leaks caused the spacecraft's main tank to lose pressure. He said there was a lot of good data SpaceX would review.

SpaceX has been developing Starship for years, and has now conducted nine test flights of the vehicle. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is depending on a variant of Starship to be ready to transport astronauts during a moon operation in a couple of years, and the vehicle is essential to Musk's long-held dream of sending people to Mars.

The flight Tuesday began smoothly, as SpaceX launched the Starship spacecraft on a previously used booster rocket for the first time. It planned to let the booster land in the Gulf of Mexico, which the U.S. now calls the Gulf of America, instead of trying to catch it.

The booster didn't make it to the water, coming apart before it could splash down.

Musk had been scheduled to give a talk Tuesday night from the company's Starbase facility, discussing SpaceX's vision of one day building a human settlement on Mars.

After Tuesday's flight test, the company didn't provide updates on the talk, which SpaceX had planned to livestream on Musk's X social-media platform.

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