Science
What's a tumbling Super Heavy and a skipped Raptor relight between friends?
SpaceX has successfully demonstrated that Starship will be just great at deploying Starlink satellites. But a return to the Moon still looks some distance off. Starship's twelfth flight test started swimmingly on Friday, May 22, at 1730 CT as all 33 Raptor 3 engines on the Super Heavy Booster were ignited, and the vehicle leaped off its Texas launch pad.The flight test was scrubbed in the final seconds of a launch attempt on the previous day, but the countdown proceeded without significant hitches this time around.
All went well for the first few minutes of flight. One of the Raptor engines shut down, but the remaining 32 continued burning. Things began to go awry at the hot-staging maneuver. The maneuver avoids a loss of acceleration by igniting the second-stage engines before the first-stage engines are completely cut off.
Things deviated from nominal rapidly after this point. First, the Super Heavy Booster flipped to perform its boostback burn, but after a flash was visible at the rear of the vehicle, the engines shut down, and the booster tumbled back into the Gulf of Mexico. It attempted to reignite its engines for the landing burn, but broke up.
