The biggest and most powerful rocket ever built took to the skies again. And this time, it came back.
SpaceX It released a height of 400 feet (122 meters). starship vehicle for the fifth time today (Oct. 13), sending the giant rocket up from Starbase in South Texas at 8:25 a.m. EDT (1225 GMT; 7:25 a.m. Texas local time).
The mission aimed to break new ground for Starship and spaceflight in general: SpaceX planned to return Starship’s giant first-stage booster, known as the Super Heavy, directly to its launch mount, the “stick” in the launch tower. catching him with his arms. in a bold and unprecedented maneuver.
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And that’s exactly what happened. About seven minutes after liftoff, SpaceX’s Super Heavy executed what appeared to be a bull’s-eye landing, near the Mechazilla launch tower, when the tower caught up with its metal arms.
“This is a day for the engineering history books,” Kate Tice, SpaceX’s manager of Quality Systems Engineering, said in live comments as SpaceX employees screamed and cheered behind her at the company’s Hawthorne, Calif., headquarters. “This is absolutely insane! On our first attempt ever, we successfully captured the Super Heavy booster on the launch tower.”
– Are you kidding me? SpaceX spokesman Dan Huot added from the launch site. “Even in this day and age, what we just saw – it looked like magic.”
Booster capture was not the only objective of Flight 5. SpaceX also aimed to send the 165-foot-tall (50 m) upper stage of the Starship—known as the Starship or simply the Ship—into space and back. the earth with a splash in the Indian Ocean. That happened about 65 minutes after liftoff, when the craft fired three of its six engines before flipping over the ocean and exploding.
“It was amazing,” Tice said. “We didn’t intend to recover any of the Starship, so it was the best ending we could have hoped for.”
Elon MuskSpaceX’s founder and CEO agreed.
“Today, multiplanetary life has taken a big step forward” He wrote in X (formerly Twitter) after landing.
A giant moon and a Mars rocket
SpaceX is developing the Starship to help humanity settle on the moon and Marsamong other feats of exploration. The vehicle is designed to be completely and quickly reusable (evidenced by the Super Heavy launch-mount landing plan, which will reduce the time required between flights). This feature, along with Starship’s unprecedented power, could revolutionize spaceflight, according to the company and Musk.
NASA believes in the vehicle, and has selected it to be its first manned landing Artemis program of lunar exploration. If all goes to plan, Starship will land NASA astronauts on Earth’s nearest neighbor for the first time. Artemis 3 mission, which aims to launch in September 2026.
SpaceX aims to launch Starship in time to meet those deadlines through its usual development strategy: tweaking the vehicle and testing those tweaks on test flights, then repeating the process. In fact, Flight 5 Starship had some significant changes compared to its predecessors.
“One of the major upgrades to Starship prior to flight was a complete redesign of the heat shield, SpaceX technicians spent more than 12,000 hours installing the entire thermal protection system with new generation slabs, an ablative protective layer and additional protection between the flap structures,” he wrote. SpaceX a 5. flight mission description.
Starship’s previous four test flights were in April and November 2023 and March and June this year.
The rocket has performed better with each successive flight. The debut mission lasted just four minutes, for example; SpaceX ordered a detonation in the skies over Texas after the Starship’s two stages were unable to separate. But Flight 4which was launched on June 6, was a complete success; The ship reached orbital velocity, and both it and the Super Heavy survived the return to Earth, landing in their designated splash zones. And Starship took another leap today.
The waiting game
If it were up to SpaceX, Flight 5 would probably be on the books two months ago; The company said Starship was technically ready to go in early August.
The launch requires permission from the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), however, and the agency took more time before giving it the green light. In fact, last month, the FAA said it did not expect to approve Flight 5 before the end of November.
The FAA explained its reasoning in an email to Space.com on September 11.
“SpaceX’s current the license The Starship Flight 4 launch permit also allows for multiple flights of the same vehicle configuration and mission profile. SpaceX chose to change both for the launch of Starship Flight 5, which prompted a more thorough review,” agency officials wrote.
“In addition, SpaceX presented new information in mid-August explaining how the environmental impact of Flight 5 will cover a larger area than previously considered,” they added. “This requires the FAA to consult with other agencies.”
SpaceX was not happy with the news. On September 10, the company published a blog post saying “Starships are meant to Fly,” which said the FAA had given SpaceX a mid-September estimate for approval of Flight 5. The document also expressed frustration with the FAA’s pace and process and the launch industry’s regulations in general.
The Flight 5 “delay was not based on a new safety concern, but was driven by unnecessary environmental analysis,” SpaceX wrote in the release.
“We find ourselves delayed for inappropriate and aggravating reasons,” the company added. “Unfortunately, we’re still stuck in a reality where it takes longer to go through government paperwork to get a license. the rocket launch rather than designing and building the actual hardware,” the company added. “This should never happen and directly threatens America’s position as a leader in space.”
In the end, the late November estimate for Flight 5 turned out to be pessimistic.
And it’s safe to say that SpaceX wants to launch another Starship mission pretty soon. Last month, SpaceX conducted a static fire — a routine pre-launch test in which a rocket’s engines are ignited while it remains anchored to the ground — Flight 6 with Ship vehicle.
And more test missions will follow; SpaceX always has a few Starships lined up, and it’s always itching to fly.
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