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SpaceX successfully launched the world’s tallest and most powerful rocket into space for the first time.
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But Starship lost communication with SpaceX during its reentry in the Indian Ocean.
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NASA wants Starship to land astronauts on the moon. Elon Musk wants her to build a city on Mars.
SpaceX’s Starship megarocket finally thundered through the skies, over the stratosphere, and into space Thursday morning.
It was the perfect end to years of secret development, explosive test flights, and regulatory hurdles. With the launch, SpaceX proved that it can not only build the tallest and most powerful rocket in the world but also fly it beyond this world.
However, during its red-hot fall back to Earth, Starship lost communication with SpaceX, and the company said shortly afterwards that the rocket was lost.
The spacecraft may have been severely damaged or broken apart by the extreme temperatures created by the fall through the atmosphere, as it traveled at about five times the speed of sound.
Regardless, Thursday’s launch is a huge win for the company.
“This is failing at best,” Eric Berger, senior space editor at Ars Technica, said X. “One of SpaceX’s secret sauces is accepting failure as a means to an end.”
Elon Musk’s plans to settle on Mars depend not only on the unprecedented power of the Starship but also on its ability to be completely reusable.
In 2002, Musk founded SpaceX with the goal of making spaceflight cheap enough to establish a permanent human settlement on the red planet. This is the rocket designed to do that.
Musk is also counting on Starship to help blanket Earth with the high-speed Starlink satellite Internet, and NASA is counting on the megawatt to return astronauts to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years.
The starship has finally proven it can be up to its massive tasks.
Historic starship flight to orbital altitude
Perched atop its Super Heavy stainless steel booster, Starship stood taller than the Statue of Liberty at the company’s new orbital launch pad in South Texas, as a crowd of SpaceX employees laughed, applauded and counted down the clock.
At about 8:25 am CT, the booster range of 33 Raptor engines came to life, blasting the steel-forced launch pad with up to 16 million pounds of thrust to lift the rocket over its launch tower and through the bright sunny skies above.
Starships are famous for their explosions. Several early prototypes of the spacecraft exploded on previous test flights. The first two attempts to orbit the rocket also exploded in the middle of the day, in April and November last year.
“Many of the innovations we’ve developed have come from our failures,” said Siva Bharadvaj, SpaceX operations engineer, at the launch live stream.
Well, the third time is the charm. The Starship launched on Thursday was the first to reach orbital altitude.
About three minutes after liftoff, Starship fired the engines and separated from its Super Heavy booster, in a dangerous maneuver known as hot staging. As the booster fell back to Earth, Starship continued to climb towards the Sky, then shut down its engines to slide through space.
“Wow, what a promotion, a hot step, an amazing sight to see Starship in space,” said Dan Huot, SpaceX’s communications manager, on the company’s live stream.
A starship spent about an hour cruising above the globe in orbit. Then it fell back towards Earth during a fiery fall through the thick of the atmosphere.
It reached a terminal velocity of over 15,500 mph, then cut communication shortly thereafter at about 40 miles above the surface.
Shortly after the communications blackout, SpaceX announced that Starship was lost.
Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built
Until now, the most advanced rockets were the Saturn V, which launched NASA’s Apollo missions, and the agency’s Space Launch System, which it developed to return astronauts to the moon.
Once fully operational, Starship is expected to be able to carry up to 150 metric tons (165 tons) into space, per SpaceX. That jumps to 250 metric tons (275 tons) if you forget about reusability and discard the spacecraft when the mission is complete.
To put that into perspective, the most powerful rocket in operation right now is SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, which carries up to 70 tons into low Earth orbit.
Starship and Super Heavy are designed to be completely reusable
Starship-Super Heavy is designed to be the world’s first fully reusable launch system. Eventually, a Starship and its booster should be able to fire their engines as they fall to Earth, lower themselves to a standing landing on solid ground or ocean barges so they can fly again another day.
However, that technological milestone will have to wait.
On Thursday’s flight, SpaceX did not test those full reusable capabilities. The booster splashed into the water, and Starship lost communication with SpaceX, so it’s unclear whether it reached the Indian Ocean or blew up during re-entry.
Reusability is a key part of SpaceX’s mission to reduce the cost of spaceflight.
The company has already achieved partial reusability with its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters, which land safely back on Earth after launching payloads into orbit. But their upper ranks are thrown out after launch.
Landing the two rocket stages safely back on Earth to fly again is a new level of engineering complexity that has never been done before, Musk said at a Morgan Stanley conference in March 2023. If SpaceX succeeds, it will revolutionize commercial spaceflight. forever.
“It’s probably going to take a few more years for us to achieve full and rapid reusability,” Musk said at the time, adding that reusability is “the breakthrough that’s needed for the to extend life beyond the Earth.”
Starship has already demonstrated the ability to launch and land itself for reuse, which you can see for yourself in the video below.
NASA’s Starship could return to the moon
It is also an important step on the way back to the moon that an orbiting starship reaches.
Although NASA’s SLS rocket is supposed to be the workhorse of its new Artemis lunar program, the agency has enough faith in SpaceX to tag Starship for a crucial part of its upcoming missions: returning astronauts to the lunar surface.
The agency has awarded $4 billion to SpaceX to turn the spacecraft into a reliable lunar landing vehicle.
SLS is supposed to take astronauts to lunar orbit, but Starship is the vehicle chosen by NASA to carry humans down to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972. That mission, called Artemis III, could happen sometime some this decade.
Later, Starship could support NASA’s construction of a permanent base on the moon.
Musk’s ultimate goal is much bigger: The billionaire has said he aims to build 1,000 starships to fly 100,000 people to Mars a year to build a city there and make humans a multi-plant species.
SpaceX has high hopes for Starship
Musk expects Starship’s fully reusable capability to translate into major savings and a faster turnaround between launches since SpaceX could reuse its rockets instead of rebuilding them for each launch.
SpaceX also hopes to use Starship to deliver huge batches of satellites into orbit. And Musk has said the behemoth rocket could run point-to-point transportation on Earth, carrying passengers anywhere on the planet in an hour or less.
The company has another unique plan to fly the largest payloads in history into deep space.
For maximum efficiency, the company aims to build a “tanker” ship, which could refuel a Mars-bound starship in Earth orbit, replenishing the gargantuan quantities of fuel that the rocket must burn to to raise itself above the atmosphere.
That allows the spacecraft to carry more cargo to Mars — up to 100 tons, according to SpaceX.
For comparison, the rockets launched by the Apollo missions, the fleet of Saturn Vs, could send 130 tons into Earth’s orbit and only 50 tons to the moon. NASA’s new moon rocket, SLS, could launch a 46 ton into orbit beyond the moon.
Starship’s massive capacity is expected to enable SpaceX to carry all the necessary materials to build a settlement on the red planet, then populate it. One Starship should be able to carry 100 people to Mars, according to SpaceX.
SpaceX’s tankers – essentially windowless and fuel-filled Starships – could also be reusable.
All that efficiency and power will be necessary to bring Musk’s grand dream of Mars within financial reach.
Read the original article on Business Insider
