SpaceX’s Starship Megarocket roared on Tuesday in the air on his tenth test flight, which brought a strong performance after a series of fiery failures began to have doubts about his future.
Towering 403 feet (123 meters), Starship is the most powerful launch vehicle ever built and the key to the vision of founder Elon Musk to carry humanity to Mars, as well as the plans of NASA to bring astronauts back to the moon.
The stainless steel colossus shot at 6.30 pm local time (2330 GMT), greeted by loud cheers of technical teams, as shown in a live webcast.
A few minutes after the launch, the first phase that is known as super heavy in the Gulf of Mexico, which led a sonic tree along the way. In contrast to other recent tests, SpaceX chose not to try a catch with the gigantic “chopping stick” arms of the launch tower, instead test how it would perform if an engine was switched off.
The attention then shifted to the upper stage – also individually known as a spaceship and intended to wear crew and charge one day – to demonstrate his possibilities while it rose in space.
For the first time, SpaceX was able to successfully implement eight Dummy Starlink Internet satellites, with cameras on board that led live views of a robot mechanism that each pushed one by one one by one.
It was not all smooth sailing. Some heat pans fell away and a small part of a flap burned down during the fiery descent of the ship, because it was dressed in pink and purple plasma.
But SpaceX communication manager than Huot said that much of it was expected, because the vehicle was deliberately flown on a punitive route with a few tiles removed.
“We are a bit mean against this spaceship a bit,” he said on the webcast. “We really try to bring the passing the passes and a little about what some of his weaknesses are.”
“Great work by the SpaceX team !!” Musk wrote on X.
‘Critical mission’
A lot had been driven on the mission, after the last three flights ended with the upper phase that exploded: twice over the Caribbean and once after reaching the space. In June an upper phase blew up during a ground test.
Despite recent setbacks, Starship was not seen as a crisis point. SpaceX’s “Fail Fast, Learn Fast” philosophy has already given it an impressive lead in launches with its Falcon Rockets, while Dragon Capsules astronauts to the ISS and Starlink has become a geopolitric property.
Yet even with a successful tenth flight, there are major challenges. Musk has identified the development of a fully reusable orbital heat shield as the most difficult task, and noted that it took nine months to make the heat shield of the Space Shuttle between flights.
“What we try to achieve here with Starship is to have a heat shield that can be flown immediately,” he said on a webcast Monday.
Another obstacle proves that the spaceship in a job can be refilled to the track with super cooled floating gas and an essential but non-tested step for the vehicle to perform deep space missions.
The time is brief to prepare a modified version as NASA’s Maanlander for 2027, and for Musk to make up for his vow to send a detailed spaceship to Mars next year.
