Last night, 12 November 2020 at , Starship SN8 fired off on a second static fire test. Something different and strange took place a bit later after the static fire. Bright red molten-like liquid seemed to be spewing from underneath the engines. This seemed pretty concerning and puzzled many viewers.

Starship SN8 Anomaly – Stills taken from LabPadre Live Cam

Elon Musk later mentioned that they needed to allow the nose cone of the SN8 to pop in order to save the Starship from serious damage. I checked Twitter a little later and found Musk saying, “Maybe melted an engine preburner or fuel hot gas manifold. Whatever it is caused pneumatics loss. We need to design out this problem.”.

Musk had then mentioned, “We lost vehicle pneumatics. Reason unknown at present. Liquid oxygen header tank pressure rising. Hopefully triggers burst disk to relieve pressure, otherwise it’s going to pop the cork.”.

After the popping of the nose cone, Musk then mentioned, ” Burst disk worked, so vehicle appears to be ok. We’ll have to swap out at least one of the engines.”.

After this anomaly after the static fire, Starship SN8 most likely won’t be ready for its 15km orbital flight. This might set back SpaceX for another week or two. I will however leave an update as to where this all goes.