Two previous attempts had ended in spectacular explosions.
Chinese mouth:
SpaceX said Starship, the world’s most powerful rocket, flew farther and faster on its third test flight on Thursday but eventually disappeared while re-entering the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean.
The company lifted off from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, at 8:25 a.m. local time (1325 GMT) and broadcast it live via webcast to millions on social media platform Watched the flight on.
The sleek giant rocket is crucial to NASA’s plans to send astronauts to the moon later this decade and Elon Musk’s hopes of one day colonizing Mars.
“Congratulations to @SpaceX on the successful test flight!” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson tweeted after the test.
All eyes are on Thursday’s launch after two previous launch attempts ended in spectacular explosions. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing: The company has adopted a rapid trial-and-error approach to accelerate growth, and the strategy has brought it numerous successes in the past.
– Achieve goals –
When Starship’s two stages are combined, the rocket is 397 feet (121 meters) tall, 90 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty.
Its Super Heavy booster can produce 16.7 million pounds (74.3 meganewtons) of thrust, nearly twice that of the world’s second-largest rocket, NASA’s Space Launch System – although the latter has now been certified, while Starship is still Prototype stage.
Starship’s third launch test in its full-stack configuration was the most ambitious yet, and the company said it was able to achieve many of its goals.
This included opening and closing the Starship’s payload door to test its ability to put satellites into orbit.
High-definition footage from the onboard camera shows the starship gliding through space, with the curve of the Earth visible in the background. It has a top speed of over 26,000 kilometers per hour (16,000 mph) and reaches an altitude of over 200 kilometers above sea level.
The Starship flew halfway around the world before beginning its descent over the Indian Ocean, and engineers cheered as its heat shield made of 18,000 hexagonal tiles glowed red.
But ground control stopped receiving signals, and the announcer announced that the ship was “lost” before achieving its ultimate goal of splashdown. The lower-stage booster also failed to successfully land on water, and as a result, the Federal Aviation Administration said it was launching an “accident” investigation.
“Starship will take life multi-planetary,” Musk, the company’s billionaire founder, later posted on X, highlighting the progress.
– Real world testing –
The first so-called “integration” test will take place in April 2023. SpaceX was forced to blow up Starship within minutes of launch because the two stages failed to separate.
The rocket disintegrated into a fireball and crashed into the Gulf of Mexico, sending up a cloud of dust over a town miles away.
A second test in November 2023 went slightly better: the booster separated from the spacecraft, but then both exploded in the ocean in what the company euphemistically called a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”
It currently costs SpaceX about $90 million to build each Starship, according to a report released in January by research firm Payload.
SpaceX’s strategy of testing in the real world rather than in a lab has paid off in the past.
Its Falcon 9 rocket has become a workhorse for NASA and the commercial sector, its Dragon spacecraft carries astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station, and its Starlink internet satellite constellation now reaches dozens of countries.
But SpaceX is already ready for NASA’s plan to use a modified Starship as a lander to return astronauts to the moon in 2026.
China aims to send its first astronauts to the moon in 2030.
Not only does SpaceX have to prove it can safely launch, fly and land Starship, it ultimately has to prove it can send multiple “Starship tankers” into orbit to refuel a main Starship at supercooling temperatures , to continue its journey to the moon.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
