Starship SN11 Lost in the Fog
SpaceX's SN11 prototype was destroyed during descent today, the fourth Starship in a row to be lost, with thick fog hiding the failure from cameras.
SpaceX tried again this morning, and once again Starship didn’t make it home in one piece. SN11 lifted off from Boca Chica, Texas today and was destroyed at some point during its descent back to the pad. The frustrating part for anyone watching the livestream: a thick blanket of fog rolled over the site right around the critical part of the flight, so we never actually got to see what happened. One moment there’s a vehicle somewhere up there, the next there’s debris, and the cameras just show gray soup.
This is now four high-altitude prototypes in a row that have ended in a loss — SN8, SN9, SN10, and now SN11. Each one has flown the same basic profile: climb to altitude, cut engines, do the belly-flop freefall, then flip upright and relight engines for the landing burn. And each one has found a new and different way to not stick the landing. SN8 came in too fast and hit the pad hard. SN9 had an engine that didn’t relight properly and it also augured in. SN10 actually managed to land, sort of, before exploding several minutes later from what looked like a rough touchdown that damaged the vehicle. Today’s failure mode is still a mystery, at least until SpaceX puts out more detail or someone dissects the audio and telemetry that did get through the fog.
There’s something almost funny about a rocket company getting foiled by weather in the “we can’t see what went wrong” sense rather than the “we can’t launch” sense. Normally fog delays a launch. Here it launched fine and just hid the crash.
The pattern so far
None of this should come as a shock to anyone who’s been following the Starship program. This is exactly the iterate-fast, blow-stuff-up, learn-and-repeat approach SpaceX has been open about since the early prototypes. Each flight has been getting further into the flip-and-land maneuver, which is genuinely one of the hardest parts of the whole concept — using the belly-flop for aerodynamic braking and then flipping to land tail-first is not something any other rocket program has attempted at this scale. Nobody expected a clean sweep of successes this early.
What’s notable is how little runway SpaceX is giving itself between failures. There’s already an SN15 sitting in the assembly area, and by most accounts it’s got a batch of upgrades over SN11 and its predecessors — reworked avionics, updated engines, structural tweaks that are supposed to address the various failure points these last few vehicles have run into. Whether it fixes whatever bit SN11 today is anyone’s guess until we know the actual cause.
I’ll say this: the fog obscuring the failure is a minor gift and a real annoyance at the same time. A gift because it means the explosion (assuming that’s what it was) wasn’t quite as dramatic a spectacle for the anti-SpaceX crowd to point to. An annoyance because the whole appeal of watching these tests live is seeing exactly how physics wins this round. Guess we wait for SN15.