by SpaceX is huge Super Heavy Starship rocket, the most powerful ever built for a long time, exploded on its third test flight on Thursday morning. The purpose of the test was to boost the unpiloted upper stage into space on an orbital launch to a controlled re-entry and splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
The massive rocket’s 33 Raptor engines, spewing 40,000 pounds of liquid oxygen and methane propellants per second, exploded with an earthquake roar at 9:25 a.m. EDT and sped to the lift thrust.
Moments later, the 394-foot-tall rocket began to climb skyward, exploding through clouds of dust and steam generated by the booster’s fire exhaust, evaporating streams of water upward at the base of the pad to cushion the shock of the engine’s ignition.
Accelerating gently to shed propellants and lose weight, the Super Heavy-Starship drifted eastward over the Gulf of Mexico, putting on a spectacular show for thousands of area residents, tourists and a large number of journalists watching from the site launched and the South nearby. Padre Island a few miles to the north.
The fire appeared to be normal on all 33 Rockets, pushing the rocket past the region of maximum aerodynamic stress as it accelerated through the speed of sound and out of the dense lower atmosphere.
Two minutes and 42 seconds after liftoff, the Raptors began their shutdown as planned, seconds later by igniting the upper Starship’s six engines with the booster still attached, a recent modification known as “hot staging.” Moments later, the Super Heavy and Starship ranks were cleanly separated.
The booster then turned around and started heading back towards the shore for a controlled descent to splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. The Starship continued towards space.
The Starship’s Raptors completed a shutdown as scheduled eight and a half minutes after the breach. It was expected to re-enter and splash in the Indian Ocean about an hour later.
Problems with previous test flights
Two previous test flights ended in spectacular self-destructive conflagrations – the firstLast April, after multiple Super Heavy engine shutdowns and stage separation malfunctions and the secondin November, just before the Starship would start a planned loop around the planet for a splash in the Pacific Ocean north of Hawaii.
SpaceX engineers changed multiple systems after the failures, including work to beef up the rocket’s self-destruct system, improve engine performance and protect the pad with a high-powered water deluge system that dampens the acoustic shock of the ignition. engines. .
The company also implemented the “hot staging” technique where it ignites the Starship’s Raptor engine while the stage is still attached to the Super Heavy booster. Hot staging, used for many years by Russian Soyuz rockets, helps ensure a more efficient stage separation sequence.
“Starship’s second flight test achieved several major milestones and provided valuable data to continue the rapid development of Starship,” SpaceX said on its website. “This rapid iterative approach to development has been the basis for SpaceX’s major innovative breakthroughs.”
For its third test flight, the main goals were almost the same, to boost the Starship into space for a sub-orbital test flight and high-speed re-entry and to make controlled landings at both stages, the Super Heavy in the Gulf. Mexico and the Starship in the Indian Ocean.
SpaceX pioneered technology that allows the company to recover and reuse smaller Falcon 9 boosters. But no Starship has ever tried to come back down through the atmosphere from space, laying insulating tiles on its belly at temperatures higher than 3,000 degrees.
Although both stages are designed to be fully reusable, there were no recovery plans for the third test flight. Both stages were expected to attempt a rocket descent that would mimic actual landing procedures but both stages were expected to break up and be impacted by the ocean.
During the Starship’s coast towards entry, flight controllers planned to test a payload door that will be used on future flights to launch Starlink satellites.
More importantly for NASA, the rocket was an attempt to move cryogenic propellants from one tank to another in the weightless environment of space and the first restart of a Raptor engine outside the atmosphere.
The propellant transfer test and the Raptor restart are critical milestones for NASA, which is paying SpaceX billions to build a Starship variant to serve as the Human Landing System, or HLS, for the agency’s Artemis moon program.
The HLS will require automated refueling in Earth orbit by multiple Super Heavy Starship tankers before restarting their engines to go to the moon to await the arrival of the astronauts who will use the spacecraft to transport them to and from the surface.
Up to 10 or so refueling flights will be necessary for a single HLS flight to the moon.
The largest rocket ever built
Although clearly a challenge, the fully reusable Super Starship, dubbed “Starship”, is a potential game changer, a potentially revolutionary step aimed at increasing payload weight into orbit and greatly reduce the cost.
It is the largest rocket ever built, standing 39 stories tall, measuring 29.5 feet wide and generating more than 16 million pounds of thrust from its SpaceX-designed Raptor engines, twice the power of a Launch System’s lunar rocket Space NASA and the agency’s legendary Saturn 5.
The Super-Heavy first stage alone is 23 stories tall and the Starship’s upper stage, designed to carry cargo, passengers or both, rises another 164 feet and is equipped with its own six Raptor engines.
The Super Heavy is designed to fly back to its launch pad, either in Boca Chica or at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, after boosting the Starship’s upper stage out of the lower atmosphere and then descending to touchdown, captured by two giant robotic arms on. the launch bridge.
Starships are designed to fly themselves to landings anywhere there are landing pads available including the moon and, eventually, Mars.
SpaceX launched the Super Heavy-Starship on its first flight last April 20, but the rocket suffered numerous failures or engine shutdowns. The rest of the shot continued after the expected shutdown time and the first and second stages failed to separate normally. The self-destruct system was triggered, but it took longer than expected to activate.
Appearing to fall apart, the rocket blew itself up four minutes after liftoff. The maximum height was 24 miles.
In its second test flight last November 18, the Super Heavy booster functioned normally, the hot stage procedure worked as intended and the Starship upper stage separated normally to continue the contraction into space on the power of six Raptor engines.
Meanwhile, the Super Heavy turned around as expected and began flying back toward the Texas coast for a splashdown. But moments after turning around, the rocket exploded in a shower of debris. The Starship stage flew itself into space as planned but just before or during engine shutdown, it, too, exploded.
It is imperative that the Super Heavy Starship be flown on a regular basis NASA’s Artemis lunar program. NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract in 2021 to develop a variant of the Starship upper stage to carry astronauts from lunar orbit down to the surface and back. Artemis crews will go to the moon and back using Orion capsules built by Lockheed Martin.
NASA’s contract calls for one untried lunar landing test flight before astronauts attempt an actual landing. Artemis managers are targeting late 2026 for the first lunar landing with astronauts on board.
But that will depend on SpaceX launching enough Super Heavy-Starship flights to demonstrate reliability. Although SpaceX’s philosophy is to fly often, learn from mistakes and fly again, NASA will need a long series of successful flights before the agency deems it safe to send astronauts aboard.
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