SpaceX Starship rocket test ends after facing landing burn; here is all you need to know

For the fourth time, on Tuesday, March 30, SpaceX’s starship prototype, SN11, took to the skies over Texas and blasted off from SpaceX's Starbase test site near Boca Chica Village. During the broadcast, John Insprucker, launch commentator for SpaceX, said, "Looks like we've had another exciting test of Starship Number 11. Starship 11 is not coming back, do not wait for the landing”. The rocket reached a height of 6.2 miles (10 kilometres) before beginning the landing procedure. However, nearly after six minutes, SpaceX's broadcast cameras cut out.

Taking to Twitter, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote, “Looks like engine 2 had issues on ascent & didn't reach operating chamber pressure during landing burn, but in theory, it wasn't needed. Something significant happened shortly after landing burn started. Should know what it was once we can examine the bits later today”.

Increasing risks of collision

This comes after the space industry experts warned that the company SpaceX is rapidly adding to the number of satellites in orbit, heightening the risk of collisions between space objects, generating an abundance of debris. According to Business Insider, SpaceX’s Starlink has already blasted around 1,300 satellites into orbit and it now also plans for a mega constellation of up to 42,000 spacecraft in mid-2027. Even though SpaceX has said that its satellites can avoid collisions, experts, however, feel that if the satellites’ communications or operations fail in orbit, they become hazards to space traffic. 

While speaking to the media outlet, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said that in the lower part of the Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Starlink satellites are completely dominating the space object population. McDowell noted that there are around 300 other satellites in the lower LEO, including the ISS, in comparison to the 1,300 Starlink satellites. And he further said that there is a point at which they are so many of them manoeuvring all the time that it’s a “hazard” to traffic in space.

(Image Credits: AP/SpaceX)