Starship’s third full-stack configuration launch test will be the most ambitious yet.
Little mouth:
Starship, the world’s most powerful rocket, successfully exploded on its third test flight on Thursday, with a live broadcast watched by 2 million people.
It lifted off from SpaceX’s Starbase in southeast Texas at around 8:25 a.m. local time (1325 GMT).
The giant rocket is crucial to NASA’s plans to send astronauts to the moon later this decade and Elon Musk’s hopes of eventually colonizing Mars.
Two previous attempts ended with spectacularly explosive results, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing: the company has adopted a rapid trial-and-error approach to speed development, and the strategy has been successful in the past.
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 (SLS) – although the latter is now certified and Starship is still in the prototype stage.
Starship’s third full-stack configuration launch test will be the most ambitious yet.
Objectives include opening and closing the Starship’s payload door to test its ability to carry satellites and other cargo into space.
SpaceX also plans to reignite the spacecraft’s engines in space and conduct an onboard test that could help pave the way for future Starships to refuel each other in orbit.
The Starship’s planned trajectory is to fly halfway around the Earth, brake in the atmosphere, then free-fall into the Indian Ocean more than an hour after launch, possibly disintegrating and exploding on impact. Soft splash is planned for future testing.
SpaceX has been developing Starship prototypes since 2018, with early tests involving only short jumps from the upper stage, also known as Starship.
– Third time luck? –
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.”
The FAA concluded its investigation into the incident last month after identifying 17 corrective actions that SpaceX needed to take.
SpaceX’s “rapid iterative development” strategy has paid off for the company 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 time is running out for SpaceX to prepare for NASA’s plan to return astronauts to the moon in 2026 using a modified Starship as a lander.
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 the Starship as it continues 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.)
