SpaceX launched the fifth flight of its Starship rocket on Sunday and made the first spectacular capture of the 20-story-high rocket.
The achievement marks a major milestone in SpaceX’s goal of making Starship a fully reusable rocket system.
Elon Musk‘s company launched the Starship at 8:25 a.m. ET from its Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas. The rocket’s “Super Heavy” booster returned to the company’s launch tower arms nearly seven minutes after launch.
“Are you kidding me?” SpaceX communications manager Dan Huot said during the company’s webcast.
“What we just saw, it looked like magic,” Huot added.
The Super Heavy booster lands on the company’s launch tower during Starship’s fifth flight on October 13, 2024.
SpaceX
Astronaut Chris Hadfield, who flew into space three times, congratulated SpaceX the message in social networks
“Today was a tremendous step forward in human capacity. It makes me even more excited about our collective future,” Hadfield wrote.
The starship separated and continued into space, hoping to travel to the center of the Earth before re-entering the atmosphere and splashing down in the Indian Ocean.
The Federal Aviation Administration granted SpaceX a license to launch Starship’s fifth flight on Saturday. earlier than previously estimated by the regulator.
There are no people on the fifth Starship flight.
SpaceX has flown the entire Starship rocket system in four spaceflight tests so far, including launch April and November last year, as well as this one March and june. Each test flight achieved more milestones than the last.
The company’s rocket successfully completed a flight test for the first time during its June flight, when Starship splashed down in the Indian Ocean after surviving intense thrusts to re-enter the atmosphere. Additionally, the rocket’s thruster returns in one piece for a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
SpaceX Starship sits on a launch pad at Starbase Boca Chica, Texas on October 12, 2024, ahead of the Starship Flight 5 test. The test will return to the Starship’s Super Heavy Booster launch site.
Sergio Flores Afp | Getty Images
The Starship system is designed to be fully reusable and aims to become a new method of flying cargo and people beyond Earth. The rocket is also central to NASA’s plan to return astronauts to the moon. SpaceX won a multimillion-dollar contract to use the agency’s Starship as a lunar landing crew as part of NASA’s Artemis lunar program.
Company leadership has said that SpaceX expects to fly hundreds of Starship missions before the rocket launches with any crew.
SpaceX insists it tries to build on “what we’ve learned from previous flights” in its approach to developing a massive rocket.
But the company wanted to launch the fifth flight before October, and as a result, SpaceX and Musk have been vocally critical of the FAA, saying that “overdue environmental analysis” was holding up the process.
The FAA and its partner agencies, the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service, completed the assessments faster than expected, which SpaceX has had to do as well. pay the fines to environmental regulators regarding unauthorized water discharges At the launch site in Texas.
Objectives of the fifth flight
The SpaceX Starship is seen on the launch pad ahead of its third flight test from Starbase on March 12, 2024 in Boca Chica, Texas.
Chandan Khanna | AFP | Getty Images
With the booster capture, SpaceX has passed the milestone of its fourth test flight.
The company accomplished its objective of returning the booster to the launch site and used the “chewing stick” arms on the tower to capture the vehicle. The company sees an ambitious capture approach as key to making the rocket fully reusable.
“SpaceX engineers have spent years preparing the booster capture attempt and months testing, technicians have spent tens of thousands of hours building the infrastructure to maximize our chances of success,” the company wrote on its website.
The company said that this capture must meet thousands of criteria. If it hadn’t been ready, the booster would have veered off its return course to splash down the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
“We accept no compromises when it comes to ensuring the safety of the public and our team, and a return will only be attempted if conditions are right,” SpaceX said.
the rocket
Starship is the tallest and most powerful rocket ever launched. Fully loaded with Super Heavy boosters, the Starship is 397 meters tall and about 30 meters in diameter.
The Super Heavy booster, 232 meters high, is what starts the rocket’s journey into space. At its core are 33 Raptor engines, which together generate 16.7 million pounds of thrust — twice the 8.8 million pounds of thrust on NASA’s Space Launch System rocket. It was released in 2022.
The Starship itself, at a height of 165 meters, has six Raptor engines: three for use in the Earth’s atmosphere and three for operation in vacuum.
The rocket is powered by liquid oxygen and liquid methane. The entire system requires more than 10 million pounds of propellant to launch.
