Also the ninth test flight of the Starship rocket by Elon Musks (53) space company Spaceex failed. For the billionaire, who wants to take care of politics again, but more about his companies, this is another setback, since it was also the case with his electric car company Tesla Not quite round.
The 122 -meter -long rocket started on Tuesday from the space station in Starbase in Texas. It is the heart of Musk’s plan to send people to Mars. At this start, the upper level of the rocket was placed on an already used lower level. However, SpaceX lost contact with the lower school when relegation, which then fell uncontrollably into the sea and did not end up in a controlled manner as planned. The rocket continued to flew into the suborbital space before it started to spin uncontrollably after 30 minutes. Previously, SpaceX had already rejected the plan to shoot eight Starlink satellites into space, since the intended mechanism did not work as expected. “It doesn’t look good for many of our today’s goals in orbit,” said SpaceX spokesman Dan Huot in a live stream of the company.
Musk actually wanted to report on his ambitions in space research after the test flight in a speech in Starbase. Hours later he hadn’t given the speech. The planned trajectory for Starship had planned an almost complete circumnavigation of the earth and a controlled landing in the Indian Ocean, for example to test new designs of the heat shield tiles.
SpaceX is considered a risk manager than other space companies. The company’s engineering culture is based on a flight test strategy in which space vehicles are tested up to failure, in order to be improved.
The last two test flights in January and March had been canceled shortly after the start, the carrier missiles had exploded and rubbed down in the Caribbean – the civil aviation in the region had to be interrupted. After that, the rockets had to remain on the ground for the duration of the investigations.