SpaceX’s large Super Heavy-Starship rocket, the toughest ever built, blasted off Thursday morning for its third test flight, effectively propelling the top level unmanned into space. While the two levels made separate descents to splash down in the ocean, corporate officials hailed the flight as a breakthrough.
Spectacular live video from a camera attached to one of the spacecraft’s fins showed the red glow of the reentry heater as the spacecraft fell back into the lower atmosphere, becoming intense until the spacecraft was engulfed in a glowing fireball. The abdomen experienced temperatures in excess of 2,500 degrees.
Telemetry stopped circulating at an altitude of about 40 miles, indicating that the craft broke up before it could make a rocket-propelled descent to a destructive splashdown in the Indian Ocean. But the company highlighted the fact that it had come all the way since its launch. into space, and then deep enough into the environment to revel in a peak of warmth, to be a major accomplishment.
“Today is a phenomenal day,” said one SpaceX commentator.
Despite this, the Federal Aviation Administration said in an article about X that the loss of the two stages constituted a “twist of fate” and that the company would “oversee the investigation of the turn of fate conducted through SpaceX. “
The test flight began at 9:25 a. m. EDT when the giant rocket’s 33 Raptor engines, which swallowed 40,000 pounds of liquid oxygen and methane boosters per second, came alive with a ground-shaking roar.
A moment later, the 397-foot-tall rocket began leaping into the sky, passing through clouds of dust and steam generated by the propellant’s flaming exhaust, vaporizing torrents of water sprayed upward at the base of the pad to melt the surprise of the engine ignition.
Accelerating smoothly, devouring thrusters and wasting weight, the super-heavy spacecraft drifted east over the Gulf of Mexico, putting on a breathtaking spectacle for thousands of locals, tourists and a crowd of journalists watching from launch and from the south. Padre Island, a few miles to the north.
All 33 Raptors appeared to fire normally, propelling the rocket past the region of maximum aerodynamic stress as it accelerated to the speed of sound and exited the dense atmosphere below.
Two minutes and 42 seconds after liftoff, the Raptors began to stop as planned, followed seconds later by the firing of the Starship’s six upper-level engines while the booster was still attached, a recent amendment known as “hot level. “the Super Heavy and Starship levels were separated perfectly.
As the spacecraft continued its ascent into space, the thruster spun and began to return to shore to descend to splashdown. Most of the return to Earth went smoothly, with their engines firing as needed to slow down.
But as it approached the Gulf and passed through low clouds, the Super Heavy began to swing in wide arcs as it suffered from its orientation. At this point, the perspectives of the spacecraft’s cameras were lost and the booster made a “crash landing” without a planned engine start is known as burn-in on landing.
The Starship, on the other hand, turns out to have achieved a flawless ascent into space. Its Raptors stopped eight-and-a-half minutes after liftoff, and the craft sent stunning perspectives of space and Earth’s limbs as flight controllers conducted a series of tests. The school year starts about 40 minutes later.
Two pre-control flights ended in stunning self-destruct conflagrations: the first, last April, after several Super Heavy engine shutdowns and a level separation malfunction, and the second, in November, just before Starship began a planned orbit around the planet during a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean north of Hawaii.
SpaceX engineers changed several formulas in the wake of the outages, adding the strengthening of the rocket’s self-destruct formula, engine performance, and protecting the base with a high-powered water deluge formula that also dampens the acoustic surprise of engine ignition.
The company has also implemented the “hot level” strategy, in which the Starship’s six Raptor engines are fired while the level is still connected to the Super Heavy thruster. The hot level, which has been used for decades on Russian Soyuz rockets, is helping with greater effectiveness. Sequence of separation of levels.
“Starship’s second flight test achieved a number of major milestones and provided invaluable insights to continue Starship’s immediate progression,” SpaceX said on its website. “This immediate iterative progression technique has shaped the foundation of all of SpaceX’s major cutting-edge advancements. “
For its third test flight, the main objectives were pretty much the same: propelling the Starship into the zone for a suborbital test flight and a high-speed re-entry and performing controlled landings through the two stages, the Super Heavy in the Gulf. and the Starship in the Indian Ocean.
SpaceX pioneered a technology that allows the company to reuse small Falcon 9 boosters. But no spacecraft has ever attempted to re-enter the atmosphere from space, subjecting the insulating tiles on its underside to temperatures above 2,500 degrees.
Although both stages are designed to be completely reusable, there is no recovery plan for the third verification flight. The flight plan called for either stage to attempt rocket-propelled descents mimicking real-life landing procedures, and any one of them would break apart and sink. The effect on the ocean. As it turned out, none of the steps went that far, but it was close.
Anyway, on the way to Starship’s entrance, flight controllers tested a payload gate that will be used on long-duration flights to release Starlink satellites.
Most importantly for NASA, the rocket effectively transferred cryogenic propellants from one tank to another in the weightless environment of space and performed the first reboot of a Raptor engine out of the atmosphere.
The booster movement and the restart of the Raptor are critical milestones for NASA, which is paying billions to SpaceX to build a Starship variant to serve as a human landing system, or HLS, for the agency’s Artemis lunar program.
The HLS will require automated refueling in Earth orbit via several Super Heavy-Starship tankers before restarting its engines to head to the Moon while awaiting the arrival of astronauts who will use the spacecraft to transport them to and from the surface.
Up to a dozen refueling flights will be needed for an HLS flight to the Moon.
While obviously challenging, the fully reusable Super Heavy-Starship, collectively known simply as “Starship,” is a potential game-changer, a potential revolutionary step aimed at increasing the weight of the payload in orbit while also reducing costs.
It’s the largest rocket ever built, measuring 39 stages, measuring 29. 5 feet across and generating more than 16 million pounds of thrust with its SpaceX-designed Raptor engines, twice the strength of NASA’s Space Launch System moon rocket and the agency’s mythical Saturn 5. . .
The first Super Heavy level measures 23 stories, while the Starship’s upper level, designed to carry cargo, passengers, or both, rises a further 164 feet and features six Raptor engines.
The Super Heavy is designed to return to its launch pad, either at Boca Chica or the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, after propelling the Starship’s upper level out of the lower atmosphere and then descending to land, captured via two massive robotic arms. Release gantry.
Spacecraft are designed to fly on their own to make landings anywhere landing platforms are available, such as on the Moon and, eventually, Mars.
SpaceX unveiled the Super Heavy-Starship on its maiden flight on April 20, but the rocket suffered engine failure or shut down. The others continued firing beyond the scheduled stop time and the first and second floors did not separate normally. The self-destruct formula was activated, but took longer than expected to activate.
Visibly in free fall, the rocket exploded 4 minutes after liftoff. The maximum altitude was 24 miles.
During its second test flight on Nov. 18, the Super Heavy booster operated the Array, the hot preparation procedure worked as planned, and the upper level of the Starship separated to continue the ascent into space thanks to the strength of its six Raptor engines.
Meanwhile, the Super Heavy turned as planned and began returning to the Texas coast for a splashdown. But moments after turning around, the rocket exploded in a hail of debris. The Starship’s level flew into space as planned, but just before the engine shut down, it also exploded.
Flying the Super Heavy-Starship on a normal basis is a must for NASA’s Artemis lunar program. NASA awarded SpaceX a $2. 9 billion contract in 2021 to expand a top-level variant of the Starship to send astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface and back. Artemis teams will travel to and from the Moon using Lockheed Martin-built Orion pills.
NASA’s contract calls for an unmanned lunar landing flight before astronauts can make a true landing attempt. Artemis executives are aiming for the first moon landing with astronauts on board until the end of 2026.
But that will depend on SpaceX launching enough Super Heavy-Starship flights to prove its reliability. While SpaceX’s philosophy is to fly frequently, be informed of your mistakes, and fly again, NASA will want a long series of successful flights before the company will consider it. to take astronauts on board.