That was one hell of a landing.
SpaceX ran a high-altitude suborbital flight test of its Starship rocket on Wednesday. In the video above, the rocket launches at the 1:48:17 minute mark, and for a few glorious minutes flies high before attempting a vertical landing back on Earth.
Ouch.
Image: spacex
At the 1:54:58 mark, Starship touches back down in Cameron County, Texas — with explosive force.
Boom.
Image: screenshot / spacex
“Successful ascent, switchover to header tanks & precise flap control to landing point,” wrote SpaceX CEO Elon Musk after the test flight.
Fuel header tank pressure was low during landing burn, causing touchdown velocity to be high & RUD, but we got all the data we needed! Congrats SpaceX team hell yeah!!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 9, 2020
The reason for the explosion, according to Musk, is that the touchdown velocity was “high” (which, yes). Even so, the CEO says SpaceX got the data it needed and that the test flight was a success.