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SpaceX is on June 5 for the next flight of its large Starship rocket, the company announced Friday.
The highly anticipated flight, the fourth in a program to get Starship up and running toward eventual reuse, will seek to demonstrate the Super Heavy First Stage’s ability to make a comfortable landing in the Gulf of Mexico and perform a controlled reentry. to the Earth’s environment before falling into the Indian Ocean.
This project will not bring any payloads, as SpaceX seeks to gain more flight knowledge about the functionality of the complex Starship vehicle. It is the largest and most resilient rocket ever built and the first launch formula ever designed to be completely and temporarily reusable.
As part of the announcement of the flight date, SpaceX provided information about the categories learned in the last flight test, Flight 3, which launched on March 14, 2024.
During this flight, SpaceX also attempted a comfortable landing of the Super Heavy’s first stage. After its separation from the Starship’s upper stage, as planned, thirteen of the Super Heavy’s 33 Raptor engines were effectively re-ignited to carry out a controlled flight through the underside. atmosphere. However, with this booster combustion, six of those engines shut down prematurely. Later in the descent, as the rocket approached the surface of the sea, the rocket was intended to use the same thirteen engines to make a final landing.
“The six engines that stopped at the start of boostback combustion were prevented from attempting to start combustion at the time of landing, leaving seven engines with start-up order, two of which managed to achieve main stage ignition,” the statement said. the company said in its flight summary. ” The booster had a weaker-than-expected landing thrust when contact was lost at an altitude of about 462 meters over the Gulf of Mexico and just under seven minutes into the mission. “
The cause of this failure was attributed to the blockage of an outlet through which liquid oxygen flows to the Raptor engines. Notably, something similar happened on Starship’s second test flight in November 2023. SpaceX says it has implemented “hardware modifications” to deal with this blockage. factor for the third test flight. Now, the company said, “the super-heavy boosters for Flight 4 and later will receive additional hardware inside the oxygen tanks to further enhance the propellant’s filtration capabilities. “It will be interesting to see if the company’s engineers have it in place to solve this problem.
As for the upper level of the Starship, the vehicle began to lose the ability to control its attitude during its rib phase in space. This turned out to be due to clogged valves used through the upper level reaction control thrusters. The company’s update notes that “Since then, SpaceX has added more roll control thrusters on upcoming spacecraft. “But it’s unclear if they’ll be available for Flight 4. In fact, the fact that SpaceX isn’t attempting to restart the Raptor engines on the top level of the Starship in flight suggests that those new roll control thrusters aren’t in place yet.
Ultimately, this lack of attitude control of Flight 3 resulted in a non-nominal re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. SpaceX was able to maintain contact with the vehicle up to 65 km altitude before telemetry was lost due to excessive heating.
On Flight 3, SpaceX achieved significant milestones, adding the opening of the Starship spacecraft’s shipping bay door into space and a small demonstration of propellant movement. However, due to loss of attitude control, a re-ignition check of the Raptor rocket engine was not performed. It’s a vital check, as ignition of the Raptor is necessary to perform a controlled re-entry, necessarily to ensure that the Starship returns to a remote part of the ocean and not to dry land.
For the upcoming flight, SpaceX is focused on resolving the technical issues observed on Flight 3: the cleanup locks observed in the Super Heavy’s thrust and burns on the landing, the attitude control of the Starship, its rib phase, and the control of this vehicle’s re-entry from orbital speed.
Once those issues are resolved, the company will conduct more complex tests, adding the landing of the Super Heavy booster at the South Texas launch site, deploying Starlink satellites and more propellant motion tests critical to NASA’s Artemis program to bring humans to Earth. Moon.
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