SpaceX has concluded its investigation into what went wrong in the seventh test flight of the spacecraft rocket.
Flight 7 was released on January 16th and sent Starship Aloft from SpaceX’s Starbase site in South Texas. The mission was partially successful. SpaceX has caught a huge first-stage booster of Starship, known as Super Heavy.
The rocket’s upper stage – known as the spacecraft, or simply “ships,” was to deploy ten dummy satellites into suborbital trajectories and splash into the Indian Ocean about an hour after liftoff. . But that didn’t happen. The ship suffered extraordinarily, falling apart over the Atlantic Ocean, with rain falling over the Turkish and Caicos Islands.
Just a few hours later, SpaceX had already identified a possible cause.
“As a preliminary indication, there was an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship, and there was a ship engine firewall large enough to apply pressure beyond the vent capacity.” via xa social media platform he owns on January 16th.
Further investigation confirmed the initial findings, and the expanded SpaceX was announced in an update today (February 24th).
“The most likely root cause of ship loss was identified as a harmonic response several times stronger than was seen during testing, which increased the stress on the propulsion system hardware,” the company wrote . “The subsequent leakage of propellant exceeded the air ventilating capacity of the ship’s attic, leading to a sustained fire.”
The attic, as described in the post, is an unaccompanied area at the rear of the ship, located between the bottom of the liquid oxygen tank and the heat shield. (The ship’s six Raptor engines run with liquid methane and liquid oxygen.)
The fire “finally caused all but one of the Starship’s engines to perform a controlled shutdown sequence, which ultimately led to a loss of communication with the ship,” SpaceX wrote in the update.
The loss of contact occurred about 8.5 minutes after Flight 7. A few minutes later, the ship’s end-of-flight system was autonomously triggered and designed to do so in such a situation, causing the ship to break.
Related: SpaceX catches a super heavy booster in the Starship Flight 7 test, but loses the upper stage (video, photo)
Spaceship Flight 7 Turkish and re-enter via Caicos pic.twitter.com/iuq0yay17oJanuary 16, 2025
SpaceX is taking steps to minimize the chance that similar things will happen on future spacecraft flights, the company wrote in the update.
For example, a 60-second “static fire” engine test will be conducted on a vessel vehicle and will fly on the eighth spacecraft flight.
The results of that very long firing include “informed hardware transforms into fuel supply lines to vacuum engines, adjusting propellant temperatures, and new operating thrust targets used in future flight tests” and SpaceX is writing.
“To address the potential flammability of spacecraft attic sections, additional vents and new purge systems using gaseous nitrogen have been added to the current generation of vessels, and to address the potential of propellant areas. It will make it more robust against leaks,” the company added. “A future upgrade of Starship will introduce the Raptor 3 engine, reducing attic volume and eliminates most of the joints that could leak into this volume.”
SpaceX led the Flight 7 anomaly investigation with surveillance from the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and NASA, the National Transportation Safety Board and the US Space Force. The company is working with the FAA to close the investigation and receive a “flight safety decision” in time to launch Flight 8 on Friday.
