SpaceX’s launch of the giant Starship rocket Thursday achieved a series of ambitious goals set by Elon Musk, the company’s chief executive, ahead of the test flight, its fourth.
While the flight wasn’t a perfect success, it was a sign that Mr. Musk’s vision of building the most powerful rocket ever and making it reusable could once again transform the global space industry that his company already dominates. It’s most likely encouraging for officials at NASA, which will use a version of Starship to take astronauts to the lunar surface during its Artemis III mission, currently scheduled for late 2026.
Bill Nelson, NASA’s administrator, congratulated X, the social media site that Mr. Musk owns.
“We’re another step closer to humanity’s return to the Moon through #Artemis – and then look further ahead to Mars,” he wrote.
The upper stage spacecraft was lifted into space, circled halfway around the world, survived the searing heat of re-entry, and then landed on the water in the Indian Ocean as planned.
During the descent, cameras on the spacecraft captured the colorful glow of the heated gases below. At an altitude of over 30 miles, part of one of the control flaps began to fall apart, but it still held together. Visibility was then reduced as debris smashed the camera lens.
“The question is how much of the ship is left,” said Kate Tice, one of the hosts of the SpaceX show.
However, the real-time data continued to stream via SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites to the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, until the altitude was reported as 0 – back to the surface of the Indian Ocean.
A final maneuver to bring Starship into a vertical position just before landing was ordered.
“Despite losing many tiles and a damaged flap, Starship made a soft landing in the ocean!” Mr. Musk wrote on X.
A crowd of watching SpaceX employees outside mission control cheered wildly, viewing the result as a validation of the company’s break-it-then-fix-it approach to engineering.
At the start of the flight, the rocket’s first stage, the huge 33-engine Super Heavy booster, was also capable of performing maneuvers that would take it back to the launch site in the future. A simulated landing in the Gulf of Mexico was performed for this flight.
What is Starship and why is it important?
With the Starship spacecraft at the helm of what SpaceX calls a “Super Heavy Booster,” the rocket system is the largest and most powerful ever in almost every way.
The rocket is the tallest ever built – 397 feet tall, or about 90 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty, including the pedestal.
The rocket also has the most engines ever in any type of launch vehicle: 33 of SpaceX’s powerful Raptor engines protrude from the floor of the Super Heavy. When these engines lift Starship off the launch pad, they produce 16 million pounds of thrust at full throttle.
For Mr. Musk, Starship is actually a Martian ship. He imagines a fleet of spaceships taking settlers to the Red Planet.
For NASA, the vehicle will be a lunar lander that will transport astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972.
In the short term, SpaceX also plans to use Starship to deploy the next generation of Starlink internet communications satellites.
An even more transformative feature of Starship is that it is completely reusable. This capability has the potential to reduce the cost of sending payloads into orbit – so that sending 100 tonnes into space could one day cost less than $10 million, Mr Musk predicted.
What did SpaceX want to achieve with this flight?
A few weeks ago, Mr. Musk wrote after a successful launch test
In other words, he didn’t want the vehicle to burn up.
At launch, Starship reaches orbital speeds of more than 17,000 miles per hour while reaching an altitude of 145 miles. As the spacecraft flies upside down back into the atmosphere, temperatures reach up to 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit.
On Thursday, Starship weathered that heat and then landed in a remote part of the Indian Ocean. Another goal was the soft landing of the first stage, the Super Heavy Booster, in the Gulf of Mexico.
In future operational flights, both vehicles should return to the launch site and be caught intact by the launch tower. These experiments are still in the future.
What happened on the last flight?
The previous launch in March was the first to reach speeds fast enough to put Starship into orbit. The ascent included a successful new twist: hot stage separation, in which some of the second stage engines ignited before the Super Heavy booster, or first stage, separated and fell away.
Starship’s second stage portion accomplished some of its objectives while rolling in space, including opening and closing the spacecraft’s payload door and demonstrating the movement of fuel between two tanks inside the vehicle.
But as the spacecraft rolled toward the top of its trajectory, it spiraled out of control. Onboard cameras captured the orange glow of hot plasma beneath the spacecraft. It disintegrated about 49 minutes after launch, losing communications at an altitude of 40 miles.
At the start of the flight, the Super Heavy booster was supposed to simulate a landing over the Gulf of Mexico. But six of the 13 engines used for this maneuver failed prematurely.
SpaceX blamed blockages in the fuel flow as the most likely cause of the loss of the spacecraft and the Super Heavy booster. The company said it has made changes to address these issues.
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2024-06-06 14:35:35
www.nytimes.com
