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SpaceX on Sunday morning successfully launched the latest test flight of Starship, the most powerful rocket system ever built that could one day be used to carry humans to the Moon and Mars.
Liftoff of the superheavy rocket booster, topped by an uncommissioned Starship spacecraft, began at 8:25 a.m. ET (7:25 a.m. CT) during a 30-minute launch window that opened at 8 a.m. ET. SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas.
For the first time, the demonstration mission included an ambitious attempt to maneuver a 232-foot-tall (71-meter) rocket booster into a gigantic landing structure after it had burned most of its fuel and separated from the upper starship spacecraft. The superheavy was successfully grabbed in midair with a pair of massive metal pincers that SpaceX calls “chopsticks.”
Meanwhile, the Starship spacecraft continued its own journey using its six internal engines before practicing a landing maneuver in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX does not expect to recover the upper spacecraft.
The goal of each milestone is to reveal how SpaceX might one day recover and quickly send superheavy boosters and starship spacecraft for future missions. Rapid reuse of rocket parts is seen as essential to SpaceX’s goal of drastically reducing the time and cost of transporting cargo — or crewed ships — into Earth orbit and into deep space.
SpaceX plans to eventually use the Starship capsule as a landing vehicle that will carry NASA astronauts to the lunar surface in 2026 as part of the Artemis III mission, and the company has nearly $4 billion in government contracts to complete the mission. Eventually, SpaceX hopes Starship will put the first humans on Mars.
Starship development so far has focused on increasingly complex test flights, beginning in 2019, with brief hop tests of a vehicle nicknamed the “Starhopper.” More recently, the company has moved on to more daring releases of the fully stacked starship capsule and super heavy booster.
The initial test launch of the Starship and Superheavy, called the Combined Test Flight, began in April 2023. The launch pad was intended only to eject the 397-foot (121 m) vehicle from the launch pad. It did just that minutes before flying over the Gulf of Mexico.
SpaceX is known for embracing fiery accidents in the early stages of spacecraft development, and these failures help the company quickly implement design changes that lead to better results.
The company’s goals have grown more ambitious with each additional release.
The last test launch — the fourth in SpaceX’s integrated test flight campaign — began in June. Both the booster and the spacecraft, despite showing a badly burned and wobbly wing during the webcast, survived re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere and practiced touchdown maneuvers at sea, a significant step forward.
SpaceX pushed its test further by recovering the Super Heavy Booster after launch.
Eventually, SpaceX plans to recover and reuse both the Superheavy and the Starship spacecraft. But because SpaceX has extensive experience in that arena, hashing out booster recovery is a natural first step.
Landing rocket boosters after flight is a feat SpaceX has mastered with its smaller workhorse rocket, the Falcon 9. Boosters from those rockets have made soft touchdowns on sea platforms or land pads after about 330 launches — allowing the vehicles to refurbish and fly again. . SpaceX is cutting its costs, allowing the company to undercut the rest of the rocket market.
However, the starship is a very powerful and complex system.
At its base are 33 engines, each more powerful than one of the nine engines used in the Falcon, with the super-heavy booster boosting thrust by nearly 10 times.
Instead of strapping landing legs to the side of the Superheavy like the one that adorned the Falcon 9’s booster, SpaceX built a special turret to support the Superheavy’s return to terra firma, hoping to make the recovery process even quicker.
Gopuram,” is calledMegacilla“SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has massive metal arms that look like a metal Godzilla. The arms, or “chopsticks,” can be used to stack boosters and shuttles on the launch pad before takeoff — and are designed to hold the vehicles in midair as they return to Earth.
Musk’s vision is that the chopstick arms will eventually return and set the rocket back on the launch pad within minutes of return — allowing the vehicle to take off again once it’s refueled — perhaps 30 minutes after touchdown, the CEO said on June 5. Interview.
It’s a bold vision. And SpaceX is in the early stages of figuring out how the catch works.
One July Kasturi agreed Interview SpaceX’s goal for the flight “sounds crazy,” he posted on YouTube, though it “had a good chance of working.”
“We haven’t broken the physics, so success is one of the possible outcomes here,” he said.
SpaceX picked up the super-heavy booster, requiring “thousands of unique vehicle and pad criteria to be met,” according to the company’s website, which required “healthy systems in the booster and tower and the flight director’s manual command of the mission.”
If there was an effort As the tide blew in, the Super Heavy would have attempted the sea landing maneuver once again.
The attempt occurred just seven minutes after launch, while the Starship spacecraft coasted for nearly an hour before making its controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
One problem Starship encountered during its fourth test mission in June was the loss of heat shield shells — or the thousands of small, black hexagons mounted on the spacecraft’s exterior that protect the vehicle from extreme temperatures during re-entry. Losing a large number of those shells, according to Musk, profoundly hindered the vehicle’s ability to attempt a soft landing.
“The missing shells…the forward flaps were so melted it was like little skeleton hands trying to control it,” Musk said, as the fourth plane landed in the ocean about 6 miles (9.7 kilometers) from its splashdown site. .
The company said on its website, “Undergoing a complete rework of its heatshield, SpaceX technicians spent more than 12,000 hours replacing the entire thermal protection system with a new generation of tiles, an insulating layer and additional protections between the folding structures. .”
It should help survive the rigors of starship reentry.
A successful aircraft will enable the company to tackle more ambitious projects. For example, SpaceX needs to figure out how to refuel the Starship spacecraft while it’s in orbit. Such a maneuver is necessary to give the massive vehicle enough propulsion to travel to the Moon.
If the company fails to meet its goals or sustains significant damage to its launch facilities, it could raise questions about further delays to NASA’s lunar ambitions.
Artemis, NASA’s flagship human spaceflight program, aims to put astronauts on the lunar surface for the first time since the end of the Apollo program 50 years ago.
Already, the federal space agency has warned that its goal of landing the first crew on the lunar surface in 2026 could be stalled by the Starship’s development timeline.
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