SpaceX launches Starship Flight 8 - Loses attitude control | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX launches Starship Flight 8 - Loses attitude control

spacex.com

Looks like we will get another fiery reentry.

Flight 8 lost control at 146 km altitude & 20,400 km/h. Flight 7 failed at ~144 km altitude& 20,000km/h. Will be interesting to see how the debris overlap.

Maybe some more footage from the Caribbean

Edit: Starship reentering as viewed from Cape Canaveral, Florida

https://x.com/nstewwx/status/1897795175633592384

View from the Bahamas

https://x.com/norcrossusa/status/1897796234502349117

Dominican Republic ( Reportedly - this one looks more like Flight 7 to me)

https://twitter.com/justflyandrock/status/189779568384082379...

Edit2: More

https://twitter.com/TrevorMahlmann/status/189779600324531447...

https://x.com/GeneDoctorB/status/1897798175081005540

https://x.com/VirginOrbitNS/status/1897797904942706738

Good thing the FAA acquiesced to another launch!

I, too miss the days of horses before these death trap horseless carriages took the road. We should never have allowed them on the streets.

No, really — since you wrote that comment 1,755 people have died in car accidents worldwide. Zero from SpaceX.

Yes, good thing I don't have a car (or a horse) :) but that's neither here nor there.

They can hold launches if they want, but I doubt it will come to that as long as nobody was hurt.

Falcon 9, the last SpaceX Rocket design before Raptor has a 99.34% success rate.

To match the success of SpaceX’s previous rocket design the next ~450 launches of a rocket using a Raptor engine needs to not fail a single mission.

Starship really is a make or break moment for SpaceX. They will lose all competitive advantage as the European Space Agency, China, and other private entities such as Blue Origin begin to catch up.

The failure of SLS is still able to carry a payload to the moon at a 100% mission success rate so far. The whole Artemis program probably needs to be scrapped at this point.

The comparison is a bit unfair as Falcon 9 was a pretty conventional design whereas with Sartship they are trying for full reusability to orbit which hasn't been done before.

> as the European Space Agency, China, and other private entities such as Blue Origin begin to catch up.

Catching up when? In 20 years? Nobody is close to doing what spacex is doing right now

Yeah no one is close to Starship levels of payload. But SpaceX is 0 for 2 testing any kind of payload capacity for Starship and it’s been over 2 years of testing now. 12 if you count BFR. If SLS is an abject failure due to costs and time then its 100% mission completion record makes it currently more capable than Starship.

So is no one close? Is Starship a failure? How many times do we have to watch a rocket explode when other programs and systems don’t and be told it’s all part of the plan this was actually a successful launch?

> 100% mission completion

They launched once. You don't make up stats on n=1

> So is no one close? Is Starship a failure? How many times do we have to watch a rocket explode when other programs and systems don’t and be told it’s all part of the plan this was actually a successful launch?

They mentioned it every single time before a launch: this is for learning. They expect things to go wrong. They don't expect things to be successful every single time. And they launch way more often than just any other company out there, so it's fair to say they are less careful about being 100% ready and rather want to test things and iterate on them. They also failed many times with the earlier rockets until they finally got it right - why do you think this time it will be different?

You can watch a number of different SpaceX and non-SpaceX camera views from this livestream by Everyday Astronaut.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edUNsegCqQs

At the time of writing this comment, Launch is T+2 Minutes. Tower booster catch is Go.

First stage had a couple engine issues but made it back. Second looks like a goner - spinning out of control.

I noticed one of the engines they lost on launch came back on the final burn. That’s interesting! Hopefully we’ll hear more about that, along with the full debrief on what happened to ship. What a gut punch. Sooo close

I have a question for those who understand this better than me. How do you tell the difference between "Moving fast and allowing failure lets you learn faster" break into "We've hit a roadblock and now we're just wasting money". It seems like they're getting close but of course the last 10% is much harder than the first 90%. Like they don't have the money for 100 more learning flights right? I suppose only they have the answer to this question, but less things failed this time than last time would be a decent metric.

I think the difference lies in how you move from iteration to iteration. As long as you have a goal for each iteration - to fix what you learnt the last time, or to change something to get a new data point on it - that sounds like allowing failure. I would expect you to converge towards a working state, on a large scale. If you are trying stuff without any hypothesis or deliberate plan, that sounds to me like the second.

Crazy losing two starships in a row after the initial successes. Mechazilla seems to be doing a good job though.

That's OK if it's the government paying for it.

Mechazilla makes for a nice show, but Starship was supposed to be landing on the Moon by now.

Starship development has been funded mostly by SpaceX, not by the US government. SpaceX did win a contract for the Human Landing System, but the payouts are contingent on certain milestones, such as demonstrating in-orbit refueling. Also much of that funding goes towards developing the lunar lander version of Starship, not the Starlink version that SpaceX has been testing with. If they meet all the milestones, SpaceX could be awarded $4.4 billion for the Starship HLS program, most of which would be for crew-rated lunar landers.[1] SpaceX has already spent over $5 billion of their own money on Starship, so even the largest payout wouldn't cause the majority of the funding to be from the government.

For comparison, NASA's SLS has cost $32 billion in 2024 dollars and has an annual cost of $2.6 billion. They launched one unmanned mission in 2022, and plan to launch again no earlier than 2026.

1. https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_80MSFC20C0034_800...

They also make $3B in profit every year so they generate a huge amount of tax revenue and will continue to for a very long time with Falcon and Starlink.

It's nice of you to assume they pay a "fair" tax rate but based on Tesla I don't see that happening: https://itep.org/tesla-reported-zero-federal-income-tax-in-2...

I'm not sure if deferred losses counts as 'unfair' or not, they exist in Canada and other western countries too. Employees, vendors, capital gains, property taxes, fees, etc generate plenty of tax revenue regardless of federal corporate tax rate. It's basically impossible for an $8 billion a year revenue business to not result in large amount of tax revenue for the various branches of gov.

Sure, but I guess what i'm implying is that some companies and business tycoons will do everything in their hand to pay as little tax as possible, and I'm pretty sure Musk is one of those people.

And yes, most companies will try to minimize taxes (shareholder obligations and all that), but I do think some use much more aggressive tactics than others and will use every loophole and every accounting trick possible.

I'm sure they're still deploying years of loss carry-forwards. Nothing wrong with that, but I doubt they're generating tax revenue yet.

That'll eventually change of course, and they'll be the best space game in town.

The government isn’t paying for this. SpaceX’s Starship contracts pay out at various milestones. This won’t have checked any new boxes.

For anyone interested, SpaceX has receives tens of billions in government contracts.

"SpaceX: Provides launch services to the DoD, including the launch of classified satellites and other payloads. SpaceX's CEO Gwynne Shotwell has said the company has about $22 billion in government contracts. The vast majority of that, about $15 billion, is derived from NASA."

"SpaceX's biggest Pentagon contracts include the $733 million National Security Space Launch contract awarded in October to lift satellites into orbit. The company has been tapped for more Pentagon launch contracts potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars more."

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/elon-musks-us-department-de...

For comparison, SpaceX has raised 11B in private funding since 2012: https://tracxn.com/d/companies/spacex/__UIpPfXSDe2O53VUbJNlN...

That's wildly different from what's being discussed here. SpaceX gets paid to launch satellites by the government exactly the same way any other customer would pay to launch satellites. It's not charity, it's payment for services rendered, and SpaceX won those contracts by being cheaper than the competition.

The total contract for the development of the SpaceX lunar lander is $2.9 billion which includes the cost of the actual crewed mission to the moon. For reference, each artemis launch is $4.1 billion not including development cost.

Yes, I'm in agreement with you. Just stating the values of the government contracts they received and the private investments.

Shotwell is COO. Musk is CEO of SpaceX.

If government wasn't paying for this, SpaceX would never be able to develop Starship. It can only afford it thanks to NASA's contract.

This flight won't check any boxes as you said, but that doesn't change the fact that the program is mostly financed by the government.

That’s fine, but every failure that doesn’t check a new milestone off is money out of their profits. I’m ok with that; we’ve done very well out of the Falcon 9 contracts.

(I suspect they’re making quite a bit on F9 to put into Starship, too.)

Unclear unless you have access to SpaceX accounts.

The Starship lunar lander program is 2.8 Billion into a 4.4 billion dollar contract [1]

SpaceX has also raised 8 billion in private equity funding since the Lunar contract was awarded in 2020. [2]

SpaceX estimated Launch revenue in 2024 was 4+ billion, and Starlink revenue estimated at 8+ billion. It has a separate 3 billion dollar contract to support the ISS.

Meanwhile, NASA is into SLS + Orion or 50 Billion so far [3]

https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_80MSFC20C0034_800...

https://tracxn.com/d/companies/spacex/__UIpPfXSDe2O53VUbJNlN...

https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-sls-and-orion

Isn't the Moon landing scheduled for late 2026? Still an absurdly unrealistic timeline even if everything had gone perfectly so far, but still.

As of December, the earliest mission date is 2027:

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-shares-orion-heat-shi...

> For the Artemis II crewed test flight, engineers will continue to prepare Orion with the heat shield already attached to the capsule. The agency also announced it is now targeting April 2026 for Artemis II and mid-2027 for Artemis III. The updated mission timelines also reflect time to address the Orion environmental control and life support systems.

Even the Sep 2025 mission around the Moon seems unrealistic TBH

Not suggesting any conspiracy theory or anything, maybe its just a quirk of the moderation system, but how is it that none of the Flight 8 posts have escaped out of the 'new' bin?

Like its not even that these Flight 8 stories didn't make the front page, they just aren't visible at all dozens of pages in on the non-new view despite having more visible 'points' than a lot of posts that are visible out there.

Yeah, maybe too high "controversial" score if that's a thing here. Musk related stories tend to attract crazy people raging about fabricated "hate" and downvoting "anti-Musk" wherever Reddit-style voting system exists.

But it's insane that Starship experimental launches were once more popular than how Apple M3 is right now as recent as few months ago, and now it's less popular than Nissan R35 GT-R being discontinued or even "Automatically tagging politician when they use their phone on the livestreams" article. Even if it had been actually manipulated, there should be a lot more comments here through search and inflows from other social media, if there _were_ public interest for it.

It's the biggest flying object on Earth, in a while and for a while. And it's getting just 30 or so comments. It's insane.

I, and probably other people, are less enthusiastic about Musk projects since his recent antics. Also it's a bit similar to the last flight.

(Re the antics see for example a Tesla story - 537 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43170090 and personally I'm not keen on his Ukraine stuff eg https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/2/21/musk-vows-to-fix...)

I feel the same.

I love space and used to love what SpaceX is doing but Musk made it a lot less appealing. Will still read about it but watching a live stream for hours? Forget about it.

I also like EVs and I have been close to getting a Tesla for a number of times but didn't yet, and at this rate, probably won't get one at all.

In my view, Musk turned quickly from a goofy geeky optimist to down-right repugnant. Not interested in any of his business.

Well, this one was much like the last one, and less interesting than the one before that. I'm pretty sure that if/when they manage a test that demonstrates a significant step forwards, then the interest will return.

Might get downvoted for saying this, but I've gone from being a Musk admirer a decade ago to now genuinely hoping that Starship fails. SpaceX is an incredible company in many ways, but I don't think anything they're doing is worth making Musk more powerful than he already is. If his downfall means we also have to give up SpaceX and Tesla and whatever else, so be it. We'll live.

Think about the consequences for companies that rely on the now reduced cost per KG to orbit. Should SpaceX disappear, other companies will also perish.

Isn't Falcon 9 public pricing slightly more expensive than JAXA/MHI H-IIA? SpaceX doesn't disclose true cost, but they're not even 2x cheaper than some competition. They're within same ballpark at government scale.

Of course, SS/SH is supposed to change the equation completely, but as it stands...

In the short term yes, but I think other companies/countries would get there eventually.

Not that landing rockets is easy, but proving it could be done was the hardest part.

So be it.

> but I don't think anything they're doing is worth making Musk more powerful than he already is

A lot of Musk's "power" is simply the fact that Trump listens to him. Trump may at some point decide to stop listening. And even if he doesn't, in four more years Trump won't be President any more (ignoring any possible attempt at a third term, which frankly I think is very unlikely). Even assuming a Republican wins again in 2028 (far from guaranteed), will that Republican (whoever they may be) listen to Musk anywhere near as much as Trump does? Power is fleeting.

Take away Trump, and what power does Musk have? Okay, he's a centibillionaire and CEO of a couple of major companies... how is that hugely different from what Zuckerberg or Bezos have? And he owns a social media network... Zuckerberg does too – and Zuckerberg's network has 10 times the user base, 60 times the revenue...

SpaceX gives Musk a lot of influence over the US space program - but that isn't readily transferrable to other domains. The kind of power he recently seems to have been wielding over unrelated parts of the US government has nothing to do with SpaceX, it is all about his personal friendship with the President and his donations to the President – which in principle any other centibillionaire could have done – it is just they weren't trying, or not as hard, or maybe they were but didn't have the same luck

You can get away with people not liking you, if you are successful. You can even claim that people who don't like you are jealous of your success.

Winners write history. Elon Musk and SpaceX have been on a losing streak for quite a while. Starship Flight 8 is basically Starship Flight 3 (loss of roll control), but with a booster catch.

I'm personally perplexed by the insistence on re-entry for the 5th flight in a row. This is very much unlike the Falcon 9 development strategy. If SpaceX had insisted on landing Falcon 9 before sending a payload, then there would be no SpaceX today.

SpaceX is definitely not on a losing streak here. They are completely dominant in launch — number of launches, tonnage launched, price per ton, profit per launch, it’s all SpaceX all the way down.

This one felt tantalizingly close. I’ll be interested to read what happened. The short text at SpaceX just says they had an “energetic event” — it seems like that can only mean oxygen was accumulating somewhere it shouldn’t have been? They are certainly in the “dealing with fuel leaks” phase of development if nothing else.

On dev strategy - I have no idea why they are doing it this way but I think if you can afford them end to end tests are pretty great. You’re going to have to do them at some point, and if you are confident enough on most of the intermediate steps, why not? Either way this is the greatest commercial space company of all time, I’m 100% sure they’ve talked through how they want to test ship extensively.

My conspiracy thought is either sabotage or it's getting shot down in space ha. But nah, I saw the part of the video where one of the rocket bells had a glowing spot.

Shot down I mean a laser

satellite-based laser to be clear

It’s very concerning that Starship failed twice in almost exactly the same way. That suggests some broader failure at Spacex to root cause the issues.

If you read the 7 debrief and fixes they made, I wouldn’t be surprised if they overdid something. But I agree it seems like it’s a similar problem. Happily they will tell all soon.

“rapid unscheduled disassembly“

So with the FAA now in Elon’s way, what will DOGE do about FAA officials?

Looks like SpaceX is now 0 for 2 on Starship getting to orbit(-ish).

Edit: The 0 for 2 is on Starship Block 2.

Aren’t they 2 for 4?

It’s a poor design. When you have 33 engines, the failure rate is 33 times higher. Although I’m not sure what’s the absolute minimum number of engines for a successful mission.

Regardless, it will go down in history as another unreliable design like the space shuttle.

I think you have it backwards, given that the stage which failed has 6 engines, and the stage that did its job and landed back on its own launch tower (inconceivable less than a decade ago) has 33 engines.

The booster did the job and was recovered.

True but on the way down, two out of 15 Raptors didn't fire. And of course the Raptor on the Starship failed too.

They could still recover and catch the booster precisely because they had that redundancy.

For Starship, the spinning out of control was caused by four (!) out of 6 engines shutting off prematurely, from which they clearly could not recover.

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