The third test flight of SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft marked “several important firsts” on the long road to landing astronauts on the moon, NASA officials say, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.
Starship successfully flew into space (March 14) from SpaceX’s Starbase site in South Texas and reached orbital speed, among other accomplishments. NASA paid tribute to the demonstration of Starship’s thruster movement in space, which will be crucial for future lunar missions conducted by NASA’s Artemis. program. That said, engineers want to review the knowledge in the coming weeks to see exactly how well the test flight went.
“With each flight test, SpaceX seeks to achieve increasingly ambitious goals to make Starship as informed as possible for long-term project systems development,” said Lisa Watson-Morgan, Human Landing Systems (HLS) program manager at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. A press release from the firm on March 14.
“The ability to check key systems and processes. . . allows NASA and SpaceX to gather the very important knowledge needed for the continued progress of Starship HLS,” Watson-Morgan added. Starship is the HLS provider commissioned through NASA to bring astronauts to Earth. Moon Artemis 3, which is now scheduled to launch in September 2026 at the earliest.
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SpaceX tried moving fuel in space from one Starship tank to another, and SpaceX and NASA will review the flight data in the coming weeks to see if it went well. The fuel is cryogenic (supercooled) and engineers must ensure that the stability of the spacecraft in the area was unduly affected by the operation, NASA officials wrote.
Engineers will also seek to make the movement as effective as imaginable by examining the “fluid motion in the tanks,” the firm added, with the purpose of “ensuring that [Starship’s] Raptor engines obtain the mandatory propulsion situations to allow for restart in orbit. “
However, on Starship’s test flight yesterday, the vehicle’s roll rates in the coastal phase forced engineers to abandon a “planned in-orbit reignition of a single-engine Raptor,” SpaceX wrote in a summary of the project.
SpaceX promises fast flights with Starship soon, and four more cars have already been built 400 feet tall (122 meters) in anticipation of flights in the coming months. Siva Bharadvaj, SpaceX’s area operations engineer, said in yesterday’s statement broadcast that one of these spacecraft had already suffered a static fire this week.
If you can’t see the SpaceX spacecraft in person, you can create your own model. Measuring 13. 77 inches (35 cm), this is a 1:375 ratio of SpaceX’s spacecraft as a desktop model. The fabrics here are metal alloy and it weighs only 225g.
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NASA, however, claimed to have repeated successes before embarking astronauts aboard the Starship. In June 2023, for example, Jim Free, the agency’s director, stated that SspeedX will want to complete “a significant number of launches” before Artemis program activities begin. . NASA has also raised considerations about Starship’s forward speed several times in recent months.
Artemis 3 was delayed last January for launch in September 2026, about a year after its previous goal, in part because of Starship’s slower rate of progression and in part because of technical issues with NASA’s Orion team fast spacecraft, private industry speed suits and other critical equipment. elements. Last month, however, NASA highlighted the good fortune of testing Starship’s docking formula, saying that SspeedX had achieved “more than 30 HLS-specific milestones” in pieces of hardware.
SpaceX is rarely the sole provider of HLS; Blue Origin also won a contract through NASA for crewed lunar landing services. SpaceX was the first to be selected as the sole winner in 2021 for HLS contracts, after NASA committed to choosing multiple vendors. The Government Accountability Office found no “competitive harm” in NASA’s decision, but in October 2021, the U. S. Senate directed NASA to choose a second company, and the company ultimately chose Blue Origin for its Blue Moon lander system.
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Elizabeth Howell (she/her), Ph. D. , has been editor of the Spaceflight Channel since 2022 and also covers diversity, education, and gaming. She worked as an editor for Space. com for 10 years before joining the organization full time. Elizabeth’s reporting includes multiple exclusives with the White House and the Office of the Vice President of the United States, an exclusive verbal exchange with aspiring local tourist (and NSYNC bassist) Lance Bass, speaking several times to the International Space Station and helping five human beings. area flight launches. on two continents, flying parabolic, running in a space suit and participating in a simulated Mars project. Her most recent book, “Why Am I Taller?”, is co-written with astronaut Dave Williams. Elizabeth has a Ph. D. and M. Sc. in Space Studies from the University of North Dakota, a BA in Journalism from Carleton University in Canada, and a BA in History from Athabasca University in Canada. Elizabeth has also been a post-secondary science and communications instructor at various facilities since 2015; Her experience includes creating and teaching an astronomy course at Algonquin University in Canada (also with Indigenous content) to over 1,000 students as of 2020. Elizabeth first became interested in space after watching the movie Apollo 13 in 1996. , and he still wants an astronaut. One day. Giant: https://qoto. org/@howellarea
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