In other destruction-related news, on March 30 at 13:00 UTC, SpaceX’s Starship SN11 took to the skies in the very dense fog surrounding the launch site at Boca Chica, Texas. The vehicle completed its launch, engine cutoffs, and horizontal flip at apogee like the previous three flights of SN8, 9, and 10. When it was time to restart the engines for the landing flip, something went wrong and the vehicle exploded in midair.
Debris showered the launch site and the village of Boca Chica, and lighter pieces were found at the tracking station roughly three kilometers away from the launch pad.
Six days later, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter to explain that a small fuel leak had caused a fire, destroying a part of the engine computer. This resulted in what is euphemistically termed a “hard start” where the engine turbopump shredded on the command to ignite, causing shrapnel to head up into the rocket’s fuel tanks causing them to fail and mix propellants, leading to an explosion of the vehicle.
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Test flight video
