It marks the second failure this year for Elon Musk’s SpaceX Mars program…

Elon Musk’s SpaceX spacecraft was captured on camera exploding and falling back down to Earth in its second failed attempt this year to deploy mock satellites.

Sadly, it wasn’t second time lucky this year for SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft which – not even 10 minutes after taking off from Starbase in Texas yesterday (March 3) at 5.30pm CT – came into problems, ended up losing contact with ground control and bursting into pieces.

The flight test was Starship’s eighth test overall but second attempt to deploy mock satellites this year and SpaceX’s website released a report later in the day reflecting on the test.

It explained the Super Heavy booster ‘successfully lit its 33 Raptor engines and propelled Starship through a nominal first-stage ascent’ and ‘approximately two and a half minutes into flight, the Super Heavy booster shutdown all but three of its Raptor engines as planned for hot-staging separation’.
However, despite the Super Heavy booster successfully relighting 11 of 13 planned Raptor engines and performing a ‘boostback burn to return itself to the launch site,’ its ascent then took a turn.

The report details: “Prior to the end of the ascent burn, an energetic event in the aft portion of Starship resulted in the loss of several Raptor engines. This in turn led to a loss of attitude control and ultimately a loss of communications with Starship.”