SpaceX launches Starship Flight 8 - Loses attitude control

https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-flight-8

by s1artibartfast • 1 year ago

67 59 1 year ago

spacex.com

Prickle• 1 year ago

You can watch a number of different SpaceX and non-SpaceX camera views from this livestream by Everyday Astronaut.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edUNsegCqQs

At the time of writing this comment, Launch is T+2 Minutes. Tower booster catch is Go.

bell-cot• 1 year ago

Looks like SpaceX is now 0 for 2 on Starship getting to orbit(-ish).

Edit: The 0 for 2 is on Starship Block 2.

ceejayoz4• 1 year ago

Aren’t they 2 for 4?

ceejayoz4• 1 year ago

First stage had a couple engine issues but made it back. Second looks like a goner - spinning out of control.

vessenes4• 1 year ago

I noticed one of the engines they lost on launch came back on the final burn. That’s interesting! Hopefully we’ll hear more about that, along with the full debrief on what happened to ship. What a gut punch. Sooo close

s1artibartfast3• 1 year ago

Looks like we will get another fiery reentry.

Flight 8 lost control at 146 km altitude & 20,400 km/h. Flight 7 failed at ~144 km altitude& 20,000km/h. Will be interesting to see how the debris overlap.

Maybe some more footage from the Caribbean

Edit: Starship reentering as viewed from Cape Canaveral, Florida

https://x.com/nstewwx/status/1897795175633592384

View from the Bahamas

https://x.com/norcrossusa/status/1897796234502349117

Dominican Republic ( Reportedly - this one looks more like Flight 7 to me)

https://twitter.com/justflyandrock/status/189779568384082379...

Edit2: More

https://twitter.com/TrevorMahlmann/status/189779600324531447...

https://x.com/GeneDoctorB/status/1897798175081005540

https://x.com/VirginOrbitNS/status/1897797904942706738

cozzyd2• 1 year ago

Good thing the FAA acquiesced to another launch!

s1artibartfast3• 1 year ago

They can hold launches if they want, but I doubt it will come to that as long as nobody was hurt.

vessenes4• 1 year ago

I, too miss the days of horses before these death trap horseless carriages took the road. We should never have allowed them on the streets.

No, really — since you wrote that comment 1,755 people have died in car accidents worldwide. Zero from SpaceX.

chasd00• 1 year ago

Crazy losing two starships in a row after the initial successes. Mechazilla seems to be doing a good job though.

TheAlchemist2• 1 year ago

That's OK if it's the government paying for it.

Mechazilla makes for a nice show, but Starship was supposed to be landing on the Moon by now.

enraged_camel• 1 year ago

Isn't the Moon landing scheduled for late 2026? Still an absurdly unrealistic timeline even if everything had gone perfectly so far, but still.

ceejayoz4• 1 year ago

The government isn’t paying for this. SpaceX’s Starship contracts pay out at various milestones. This won’t have checked any new boxes.

ggreer• 1 year ago

Starship development has been funded mostly by SpaceX, not by the US government. SpaceX did win a contract for the Human Landing System, but the payouts are contingent on certain milestones, such as demonstrating in-orbit refueling. Also much of that funding goes towards developing the lunar lander version of Starship, not the Starlink version that SpaceX has been testing with. If they meet all the milestones, SpaceX could be awarded $4.4 billion for the Starship HLS program, most of which would be for crew-rated lunar landers.[1] SpaceX has already spent over $5 billion of their own money on Starship, so even the largest payout wouldn't cause the majority of the funding to be from the government.

For comparison, NASA's SLS has cost $32 billion in 2024 dollars and has an annual cost of $2.6 billion. They launched one unmanned mission in 2022, and plan to launch again no earlier than 2026.

1. https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_80MSFC20C0034_800...

bayarearefugee• 1 year ago

Not suggesting any conspiracy theory or anything, maybe its just a quirk of the moderation system, but how is it that none of the Flight 8 posts have escaped out of the 'new' bin?

Like its not even that these Flight 8 stories didn't make the front page, they just aren't visible at all dozens of pages in on the non-new view despite having more visible 'points' than a lot of posts that are visible out there.

numpad02• 1 year ago

Yeah, maybe too high "controversial" score if that's a thing here. Musk related stories tend to attract crazy people raging about fabricated "hate" and downvoting "anti-Musk" wherever Reddit-style voting system exists.

But it's insane that Starship experimental launches were once more popular than how Apple M3 is right now as recent as few months ago, and now it's less popular than Nissan R35 GT-R being discontinued or even "Automatically tagging politician when they use their phone on the livestreams" article. Even if it had been actually manipulated, there should be a lot more comments here through search and inflows from other social media, if there _were_ public interest for it.

It's the biggest flying object on Earth, in a while and for a while. And it's getting just 30 or so comments. It's insane.

alextingle• 1 year ago

Well, this one was much like the last one, and less interesting than the one before that. I'm pretty sure that if/when they manage a test that demonstrates a significant step forwards, then the interest will return.

tim3332• 1 year ago

I, and probably other people, are less enthusiastic about Musk projects since his recent antics. Also it's a bit similar to the last flight.

(Re the antics see for example a Tesla story - 537 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43170090 and personally I'm not keen on his Ukraine stuff eg https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/2/21/musk-vows-to-fix...)

senordevnyc2• 1 year ago

Might get downvoted for saying this, but I've gone from being a Musk admirer a decade ago to now genuinely hoping that Starship fails. SpaceX is an incredible company in many ways, but I don't think anything they're doing is worth making Musk more powerful than he already is. If his downfall means we also have to give up SpaceX and Tesla and whatever else, so be it. We'll live.

imtringued• 1 year ago

You can get away with people not liking you, if you are successful. You can even claim that people who don't like you are jealous of your success.

Winners write history. Elon Musk and SpaceX have been on a losing streak for quite a while. Starship Flight 8 is basically Starship Flight 3 (loss of roll control), but with a booster catch.

I'm personally perplexed by the insistence on re-entry for the 5th flight in a row. This is very much unlike the Falcon 9 development strategy. If SpaceX had insisted on landing Falcon 9 before sending a payload, then there would be no SpaceX today.

vessenes4• 1 year ago

SpaceX is definitely not on a losing streak here. They are completely dominant in launch — number of launches, tonnage launched, price per ton, profit per launch, it’s all SpaceX all the way down.

This one felt tantalizingly close. I’ll be interested to read what happened. The short text at SpaceX just says they had an “energetic event” — it seems like that can only mean oxygen was accumulating somewhere it shouldn’t have been? They are certainly in the “dealing with fuel leaks” phase of development if nothing else.

On dev strategy - I have no idea why they are doing it this way but I think if you can afford them end to end tests are pretty great. You’re going to have to do them at some point, and if you are confident enough on most of the intermediate steps, why not? Either way this is the greatest commercial space company of all time, I’m 100% sure they’ve talked through how they want to test ship extensively.

ge962• 1 year ago

My conspiracy thought is either sabotage or it's getting shot down in space ha. But nah, I saw the part of the video where one of the rocket bells had a glowing spot.

Shot down I mean a laser

ge962• 1 year ago

satellite-based laser to be clear

namirez2• 1 year ago

It’s a poor design. When you have 33 engines, the failure rate is 33 times higher. Although I’m not sure what’s the absolute minimum number of engines for a successful mission.

Regardless, it will go down in history as another unreliable design like the space shuttle.

yakz• 1 year ago

The booster did the job and was recovered.

namirez2• 1 year ago

True but on the way down, two out of 15 Raptors didn't fire. And of course the Raptor on the Starship failed too.

fastball• 1 year ago

I think you have it backwards, given that the stage which failed has 6 engines, and the stage that did its job and landed back on its own launch tower (inconceivable less than a decade ago) has 33 engines.

jbverschoor• 1 year ago

“rapid unscheduled disassembly“

So with the FAA now in Elon’s way, what will DOGE do about FAA officials?

ls612• 1 year ago

It’s very concerning that Starship failed twice in almost exactly the same way. That suggests some broader failure at Spacex to root cause the issues.

vessenes4• 1 year ago

If you read the 7 debrief and fixes they made, I wouldn’t be surprised if they overdid something. But I agree it seems like it’s a similar problem. Happily they will tell all soon.

kemotep2• 1 year ago

Falcon 9, the last SpaceX Rocket design before Raptor has a 99.34% success rate.

To match the success of SpaceX’s previous rocket design the next ~450 launches of a rocket using a Raptor engine needs to not fail a single mission.

Starship really is a make or break moment for SpaceX. They will lose all competitive advantage as the European Space Agency, China, and other private entities such as Blue Origin begin to catch up.

The failure of SLS is still able to carry a payload to the moon at a 100% mission success rate so far. The whole Artemis program probably needs to be scrapped at this point.

ekianjo2• 1 year ago

as the European Space Agency, China, and other private entities such as Blue Origin begin to catch up.

Catching up when? In 20 years? Nobody is close to doing what spacex is doing right now

kemotep2• 1 year ago

Yeah no one is close to Starship levels of payload. But SpaceX is 0 for 2 testing any kind of payload capacity for Starship and it’s been over 2 years of testing now. 12 if you count BFR. If SLS is an abject failure due to costs and time then its 100% mission completion record makes it currently more capable than Starship.

So is no one close? Is Starship a failure? How many times do we have to watch a rocket explode when other programs and systems don’t and be told it’s all part of the plan this was actually a successful launch?

tim3332• 1 year ago

The comparison is a bit unfair as Falcon 9 was a pretty conventional design whereas with Sartship they are trying for full reusability to orbit which hasn't been done before.

techpineapple• 1 year ago

I have a question for those who understand this better than me. How do you tell the difference between "Moving fast and allowing failure lets you learn faster" break into "We've hit a roadblock and now we're just wasting money". It seems like they're getting close but of course the last 10% is much harder than the first 90%. Like they don't have the money for 100 more learning flights right? I suppose only they have the answer to this question, but less things failed this time than last time would be a decent metric.

roeles2• 1 year ago

I think the difference lies in how you move from iteration to iteration. As long as you have a goal for each iteration - to fix what you learnt the last time, or to change something to get a new data point on it - that sounds like allowing failure. I would expect you to converge towards a working state, on a large scale. If you are trying stuff without any hypothesis or deliberate plan, that sounds to me like the second.

SpaceX launches Starship Flight 8 - Loses attitude control

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