That’s the key to Starship bringing in the big bucks to fund Musk’s visions of building a city on Mars. To garner paying customers, Starship has to show it can deliver.
The first step is releasing a batch of eight mock Starlink satellites into orbit. SpaceX tried to do this twice already — in January and March — only to see Starship explode before it could even try opening its payload doors.
Tuesday’s flight didn’t fare much better.
2 failures in one Starship flight
The rocket thundered through the skies to reach space in one piece, but when it came time to release its practice satellites, the payload door wouldn’t open. It’s not yet clear what caused that first mishap.
The hosts on the SpaceX livestream emphasized that the more important test was the vehicle’s reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, because SpaceX had removed 100 of the spaceship’s protective heat-shield tiles to test its limits.
“These launches are all about data. The most important thing is data on how to improve the tile design,” Musk had told the space reporter Eric Berger before settling in to watch the flight from SpaceX’s control room in Starbase, Texas.
A few minutes later, though, that test went out the window too when Starship started spinning as it cruised above Earth.
