“The booster experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly shortly after stage separation while Starship’s engines fired for several minutes on its way to space,” SpaceX shared on X, formerly known as Twitter. The flight termination system is essentially a self-destruct feature that SpaceX engaged to prevent the Starship from traveling off course. “The automated flight termination system on second stage appears to have triggered very late in the burn as we were headed down range out over the Gulf of Mexico,” aerospace engineer John Insprucker said. The SpaceX team awaited acquisition of signal from the spacecraft, but shared during the livestream that the “second stage was lost.” The rocket booster and then the spacecraft were lost shortly after liftoff. SpaceX's Starship launches on its second test flight from the Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas, on Saturday morning. Internationally, the Kármán line, located 62 miles (100 kilometers) above sea level, is often used to mark the boundary between our planet and space - but there’s a lot of gray area. The US government considers 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth’s surface the edge of outer space. Starship climbed to an altitude of about 93 miles (150 kilometers) above the Earth’s surface, reaching the edge of space. SpaceX aimed to send the spacecraft to near orbital velocities, typically around 17,500 miles per hour (28,000 kilometers per hour). The Starship spacecraft used its own six engines to continue propelling itself to faster speeds. About two and a half minutes after roaring to life and vaulting off the launchpad, the Super Heavy booster expended most of its fuel, and the Starship spacecraft fired its own engines and broke away. The Starship upper stage had begun its trip Saturday morning strapped to the top of the Super Heavy first stage, a 232-foot-tall (70.7-meter-tall) rocket. Even during ground tests, SpaceX has had a hard time getting all of those engines, clustered together at the base of the rocket, to power on consistently at the same time. ET, with the Super Heavy booster igniting all 33 of its Raptor engines. The rocket and spacecraft lifted off the launchpad at 8 a.m. The Starship system made it much farther into flight than the first attempt in April. But the Starship spacecraft was able to briefly continue its journey. That process ended up destroying the Super Heavy booster, which erupted into a ball of flames over the Gulf of Mexico. The Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft successfully separated after liftoff, as the Starship lit up its engines and pushed away. So it became the first close-up image of mars to be seen on tv.SpaceX’s gargantuan deep-space rocket system, Starship, safely lifted off Saturday morning but ended prematurely with an explosion and a loss of signal. So they allowed him to continue if he did it behind a movable partition wall with armed guards around them! Eventually the media found out about it and got so excited the PR people couldn’t keep them out. They told them to quit, but Grumm argued that this was being done to confirm whether their instrument was working or not. In another side story that makes this an even more interesting story, while he and his team were coloring the image, the JPL PR folks were getting nervous that the news media would see this thing and not the “actual” pretty image. I’ve seen some of the other color schemes he tried and it could have been green or purple! It's as if they came right out of current images of the planet. It is uncanny how close his color scheme is to the actual colors of Mars. He really was looking for the colors that best represented a grey scale, since that was what they were going to get anway. Though he used a brown/red color scheme, the thought that Mars was red did not enter his mind.
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