Richard Lawler
SpaceX’s ninth Starship flight test ends in another explosion.
For the third time in a row, a Starship test ended in a “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” after tumbling toward the Indian Ocean rather than making the planned controlled descent and soft splashdown.
As noted by Space.com, this mission ran into issues trying to achieve several goals: the reused Super Heavy booster rocket broke up about six minutes into the flight instead of splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico, they were unable to test deploying eight Starlink satellite dummies, and then the ship lost control about a half-hour after launch due to a leak in its fuel tank systems.
