Space travel SpaceX loses contact with upper stage of Starship rocket
The US aerospace company SpaceX has lost contact with the upper rocket stage during a test flight of its Starship mega rocket. The company had previously managed to recover the lower rocket stage.
17.01.2025, 00:24
17.01.2025, 02:45
SDA
"At this point, we can confirm that we have lost the (Starship)," SpaceX representative Kate Tice said during a video broadcast after the rocket launch on Thursday.
"We always knew that excitement was guaranteed today, but success was not," she said. According to the company, engine anomalies had occurred during the ascent into space.
Vision of a reusable rocket
This afternoon (local time), tech billionaire Elon Musk's mega-rocket Starship took off on a test flight from the Starbase spaceport in Boca Chica, South Texas. SpaceX managed to recover the lower stage of the rocket for the second time.
As the video transmission showed, the first stage, named Super Heavy, descended back to the launch pad in a controlled manner after the two rocket stages separated and was caught by mechanical arms on the launch tower.
The company achieved this for the first time in October. With Starship, SpaceX is pursuing the goal of building a fully reusable and therefore more cost-effective rocket for future space missions. The Starship rocket system consists of a 70-metre-high first stage called "Super Heavy" and a 50-metre-long space shuttle called "Starship" with additional engines.
Competition also launches into space
Similar to SpaceX, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' company Blue Origin also wants to launch payloads such as satellites into space for numerous customers. Its new rocket "New Glenn" took off on its first test flight into space on Thursday. It reached the planned orbit. However, the reusable propulsion stage failed to return to Earth on the first attempt.
After the test flight, Musk congratulated Bezos on having "reached Earth orbit on the first attempt". The new orbital rocket from Blue Origin intensifies the rivalry between Musk, the richest person in the world, and Bezos, the second richest. So far, commercial spaceflight has been dominated by Musk's company SpaceX: commercial satellite operators as well as the Pentagon and the US space agency NASA use SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets to launch astronauts to the International Space Station ISS or satellites into space.
