WASHINGTON — The Federal Aviation Administration has closed its investigation into the second Starship/Super Heavy launch in November, bringing SpaceX a step closer to launching its third test flight as soon as mid-March.
The FAA announced Feb. 26 that it closed the investigation into the Nov. 18 launch, designated Orbital Flight Test (OFT) 2, by accepting the root causes into the failure identified by SpaceX. That includes 7 corrective actions for the Super Heavy booster and 10 for the Starship upper stage.
On that launch, the vehicle appeared to perform as expected through stage separation. However, the Super Heavy booster broke apart shortly after separation as it was attempting to perform a controlled reentry and splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. The Starship upper stage continued its ascent until the final minute of its burn, when it broke apart. SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk said in January that liquid oxygen venting triggered a fire and explosion of Starship.
The letter noted that Starship’s ascent was going normally until seven minutes and five seconds after liftoff, when the vehicle started a pre-planned dump of excess liquid oxygen. “Over the next minute, several explosions and sustained fires were observed in onboard camera aft video streams, ultimately resulting in a loss of communication between the forward and aft flight computers,” the letter stated. That led to a shutdown of all six engines and a triggering of the vehicle’s autonomous flight safety system a minute after the vent started.
SpaceX, in its own statement about the investigation, said the fires in Starship came from a leak in the aft section of the vehicle when the liquid oxygen vent started. The vehicle was carrying the excess oxidizer “to gather data representative of future payload deploy missions and needed to be disposed of prior to reentry to meet required propellant mass targets at splashdown.”
The SpaceX statement also discussed the loss…
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