On March 6, 2025, Starship’s eighth flight test successfully lifted off at 5:30 p.m. CT from Starbase in Texas. All 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster started up successfully and completed a full duration burn during ascent. After powering down all but the three center engines on Super Heavy, Starship ignited all six of its Raptor engines to separate in a hot-staging maneuver and continue its ascent to space.
The Two
On Flight 7 in January, SpaceX, said the vehicle suffered a harmonic response several times stronger than expected, creating additional stress on the vehicle’s propulsion system. That caused leaks that triggered a fire in the engine bay.
Flight 8, had torch ignition issues on individual Raptor Engines.
The Super Heavy booster then relit 11 of 13 planned Raptor engines and performed a boostback burn to return itself to the launch site. Once there, it relit 12 of the planned 13 engines for its landing burn, including one of the engines that did not start up for the boostback burn. The three center engines continued running to maneuver the booster to the launch and catch tower arms, resulting in the third successful catch of a Super Heavy booster.
The most probable cause for engines not relighting during the boostback and landing burn phases was traced to torch ignition issues on the individual engines caused by thermal conditions local to the igniter. Post-flight testing was able to replicate the issue and engines on future flights will have additional insulation as mitigation.
The timing of the Flight 8 failure was similar to Flight 7 in January, which also featured several engine shutdowns and a loss of communications about eight and a half minutes after liftoff. However, SpaceX says the two failures had different causes.
“While the failure manifested at a similar point in the flight timeline as Starship’s seventh flight test, it is worth noting that the failures are distinctly different,” the company stated.
In the case of Flight 8, SpaceX said one of the center Raptor engines in Starship suffered a hardware failure. That failure enabled “inadvertent propellant mixing and ignition” that caused the loss of the Raptor. Immediately thereafter, the other two center Raptor engines shut down, along with one of the three outer vacuum-optimized engines with larger nozzles. The vehicle then lost control authority.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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I wonder if the ‘pogoing’ effect might be cured by ‘tuning’ each engine slightly differently…
Not more/less power, but something in how fast it responds to pressure differences in the fuel/oxidizer flow – say slight variations in the pipe lengths to each engine?
Or maybe in-line expander sections with different volumes, which would each need to change pressure to match the variations before the pressure wave continues to the engine?
So almost 3 months from the last launch? Is this site falsely misleading people, how many launches will be there? Similar as lying about autopilot improvements (factor 1000 or 10000x but we fail to see that in reality). This time they cant blame FAA or Democrats for their problems.
With Tesla circling the drain, the only way Elon has to keep its money is to rely on SpaceX and huge state contracts granted directly to accomplish useless projects like the golden dome.
It’s cool to hate Elon but at least do it in reality. X is cash flow positive and Starlink should clear $2 Billion in profit this year. Both of these items have nothing to do with government contract.
Whatever makes you sleep at night… but consider that:
-I do not know what your source si when you state that twitter/X is cash flow positive, but if you refer to Linda Yaccarino on Bloomberg note that the original quote is “X is already cash flow positive, not including the cost of servicing debt,”
-Elon Musk said that in order for Starlink to be sustainable on the long run (not now that most of the satellite fleet is new and requires roughly 1000 new satellite replacements per year) they need to achieve at least two successful starship launches per month and to me it seems we are very very far from that.
I am not sure what the profitability of Elon’s companies have to do with my sleep. Really doesn’t effect me either way. It’s just math, Starlink could be a $25 billion a year profit company. They have already launched 1000 starlink satellites this year as of May. It certainly isn’t a successful starship launch but they are highly profitable today. I think you are losing sleep over it but at least be honest.
This was a good summary, something I’ve been wanting to hear about this technology. The harmonic issue is particularly interesting. It reminds me of that bridge they built in the NW USA that had a harmonic resonance in the wind, leading to its destruction.