Starship flight 8

[Legend]

Watch Starship's eighth flight test → https://t.co/alyJTRtgTh https://t.co/hlpEF4ICyT

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) March 2, 2025

Hopefully aces it. Even though it has only caught the booster twice, it's starting to feel normal.

Also redemption time for v2 of the ship. Last one blew up from pogo, first time a starship ship failed ascent since flight 2.

[Legend]

Go time 2.0 (no sike) https://t.co/SwwBujm9c5

— Dan Huot (@danhuot) March 6, 2025

[Legend]

Ship v2 is cursed yo

[Legend]

Everyone is going to want to see the footage I just captured. Starship was considerably behind the Flight club prediction, but I was able to take over joystick control and get on it seconds after it blew up in the sky. I have 4K video of the debris and of it starting to re-enter.

— Astronomy Live (@astroferg) March 6, 2025

Ship 34 reentering just north of Miami pic.twitter.com/847pwmHYLq

— david (@davidaj_fh) March 6, 2025

Nice, should have some amazing videos

[Legend]

 
Well there's your problem, the engine is gone.

Assuming this picture is real, it shows the ship immediately after the left engine blew up and before that damage propagated to take out the center engines.

The timing is suspect since this is almost the exact same time the previous v2 ship failed, but it seems to be a mostly independent issue. The engine bell was seen with a glowing hot spot before this. So unless vibrations somehow made that hotspot, it looks like a defect in the raptor engine. Which would be the first raptor failure in a pretty long time. Almost all previous raptor failures were failures with the systems that brought fuel to the engine, not the engine itself.