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Epic 33-engine burn among successes of Starship's 2nd test flight

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Starship may have gone boom on Nov. 18, 2023 but there was a lot to like about the giant vehicle's second-ever test flight. The trial mission aimed to send Starship's 165-foot-tall upper stage most of the way around Earth, from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas to a patch of the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii. But the upper stage, known as Starship, exploded about eight minutes after launch, the same fate that met the vehicle's huge first stage, called Super Heavy, 4.5 minutes earlier.


Still, the next-gen megarocket notched a number of important milestones on Saturday, among them a smooth liftoff. All 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy Booster started up successfully and, for the first time, completed a full-duration burn during ascent. Starship separated from Super Heavy successfully as well, via a technique known as "hot staging".


About 2.5 minutes into the flight, Super Heavy began "powering down all but three of Super Heavy's Raptor engines and successfully igniting the six second-stage Raptor engines before separating the vehicles. This was the first time this technique has been done successfully with a vehicle of this size.


Super Heavy then performed a planned "flip maneuver" and a boostback engine burn, with the goal of steering itself to a water landing in the Gulf of Mexico. But the booster experienced a "rapid unscheduled disassembly". The upper stage's six Raptors, meanwhile, carried that vehicle to a maximum altitude of about 90 miles and a top speed of roughly 14,900 mph.


The flight test's conclusion came when telemetry was lost near the end of second-stage burn prior to engine cut-off after more than eight minutes of flight. The team verified a safe command destruct was appropriately triggered based on available vehicle performance data. The team at Starbase is already working final preparations on the vehicles slated for use in Starship’s third flight test, with Ship and Booster static fires coming up next.




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