After launching more than a hundred small payloads from California on Tuesday and two promotional lunar rovers from Florida early Wednesday, either aboard nine Falcon rockets, SpaceX prepared a large super starship for a slow-burn launch.
But the bad weather has taken the Californian manufacturer of rockets to postpone the very publicized flight of Thursday, when it will be limited to an excursion in the NASA area outside the foreign space station and the launch of the new Glenn rocket of Jeff Bezos for its inauguration. flight.
New Glenn is expected to liftoff, delayed due to weather conditions, from Cape Canaveral Space Station Pad 36 in Florida at 1:00 a. m. EST, opening a three-hour release window.
Six hours later, area station astronauts Nick Hague and Starliner pilot Sunita Williams plan to venture into NASA’s laboratory complex for a six-and-a-half-hour walk starting at 8 a. m. in the morning to perform a variety of maintenance and upgrade tasks.
That will set the stage for the Super Heavy-Starship launch from SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas, manufacturing and flight test facility at 5 p.m. EST, weather permitting.
The Super Starhip is the most rugged rocket ever built, generating 16 million pounds of thrust on the methane-powered Raptor engines. Head to head with the Falcon 9-Family rockets dominated by SpaceX.
Like the Falcon 9’s first land, the New Glenn Booster is reusable and Blue Origin will reach its first land via landing on an offshore landing ship. The top of the rocket will remain in orbit where flight controllers will carry out a series of tests. Additional flights are scheduled for later this year.
The Super Heavy-Starship has a more ambitious agenda befitting its gargantuan size.
As with the two most recent test flights, the first level will raise the upper level of the starship outside the dense lower environment before falling and returning to the liberation site for recovery. Meanwhile, the Starship will continue to cross the space thanks to force. of its six Raptor engines.
For these initial test flights, the Starships do not attempt to reach orbit. Instead, they loop halfway around the planet and descend belly first through a hellish blaze of atmospheric friction before flipping nose up for a tail-first, rocket-powered splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
For the third consecutive flight, Spacex plans to try to “catch” the first level of the Super Heavy after it boosted the ship outside the lower atmosphere, hooking it to giant mechanical arms called wands fixed in the launch tower.
The first capture of this type last October is a success, presenting an impressive exhibition in front of thousands of enthusiastic premises and tourists. But the super heavy used for the next flight of this type a month later deviated to a tauchdown of water in the Gulf of Mexico due to the wounds in the sensors of the release tower that were needed to attend the consultant of the descending reinforcement to the position.
The new sensors now have a more physically powerful shield to eliminate this damage and SpaceX engineers are optimistic they will soon incorporate super-heavy boosters with the same regularity as they have demonstrated with the Array company’s Workhorse Falcon nine rockets.
But the bulk of the updates reviewed Thursday are embedded in what SpaceX calls a “next-generation” spacecraft. Several systems have been changed to verify the functionality and systems required for an eventual recovery of the level.
“This new year will be transformative for spacecraft,” SpaceX said on its website, “to enable the reuse of the entire formula online and borrow increasingly ambitious missions, while being able to send humans and cargo into Earth orbit. “The Moon and Mars.