The largest and most powerful rocket ever built now has half a dozen launches.
SpaceX400 feet (122 meters) high starship The megarocket lifted off for the sixth time ever today (Nov. 19), lifting from orbit at the company’s Starbase site in South Texas at 5:00 p.m. EST (2200 GMT; 4:00 p.m. Texas local time).
SpaceX landed Starship’s giant first-stage booster, known as the Super Heavy, on the launch tower of the vehicle’s final flight. It happened on October 13. The company aimed to repeat that feat—which the tower achieved with its “tiny” arms—but flight data did not support the attempt.
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“We broke a commitment criterion,” SpaceX’s Dan Huot said during the company’s Flight 6 webcast. So instead of the Super Heavy going down in a controlled splash in the Gulf of Mexico, it hit the waves seven minutes after takeoff.
Anticipation for Flight 6 was high, in part because of the planned booster capture attempt. For example, President-elect Donald Trump made a trip to South Texas See Flight 6 in person.
Trump’s support for Musk and Starship isn’t terribly surprising; the two millionaires seem to have become quite close in recent months.
Musk campaigned hard for Trump’s election and put it Over $100 million from his own money for that effort. And Trump has nominated Musk Direct to “Department of Government Efficiency”. This advisory group, said Trumphe will help his administration “dismantle the Government Bureaucracy, reduce excessive regulation, reduce wasteful spending and restructure Federal Agencies.”
An action-packed flight
Today’s mission aimed to do much more than just get back to Super Heavy the land in one piece SpaceX also wanted to put the stage on top of the Starship—a 165-foot-tall (50 m) spacecraft called the Starship, or simply “Ship.”
The launch sent the Ship on the same semi-orbital trajectory it took on Flight 5, aiming to launch about 65 minutes off the northwest coast of Australia in the Indian Ocean. But Ship also hit some new milestones along the way this time around.
For example, Flight 6 carried the first ever Starship cargo: a fancy banana inside the ship, which served as a zero-gravity indicator. (It did not deploy into space.) Also, Ship re-ignited one of its six Raptor engines about 38 minutes into the flight. (Super Heavy also employs Raptors – a whopping 33 of them).
This burn showed that Ship can perform the maneuvers needed to safely return to Earth during orbital missions. In fact, the Ship is designed to be completely and quickly reused, like the Super Heavy; SpaceX eventually plans to catch up with stick arms as well, and will likely attempt to do so on a test flight in the near future. (Rather than landing directly on the launch assembly on a ship or a designated one touch pad(It will allow for faster and more efficient inspections, upgrades and reflights, SpaceX said).
Flight 6 also tested modifications to the spacecraft’s heat shield, which protects the vehicle during re-entry. Earth’s atmosphere.
“The flight test will evaluate new secondary thermal shielding materials and remove entire sections of the heat shield slab on both sides of the spacecraft where hardware is being considered to enable capture in future vehicles,” SpaceX wrote. mission description. “The craft will also fly at a higher angle of attack during the final phase of the deliberate descent, deliberately stressing the flap control limits to obtain data on future landing profiles.”
SpaceX also changed the launch time of Flight 6 to better observe the Ship’s re-entry and splashdown. Flight 5 (and the four before it) took off from Texas in the morning, and Ship descended in darkness on the other side of the world.
So we’ve all seen great views today of the return of the Boat, which has gone swimmingly. The shiny silver rover survived its scorching journey through the planet’s atmosphere, firing three of its six Raptors, flipping into a vertical position as it approached the water and hitting waves base-first 65.5 minutes after liftoff.
“Unbelievable! We really pushed the limits on Ship, and it came back to Earth,” Jessica Anderson, SpaceX’s manufacturing engineering manager, said in today’s webcast.
“I’m shocked, to be honest,” added webcast host Kate Tice, SpaceX’s senior quality engineering manager. “I think there are a lot of people. The fact that a heat shield from a lower generation survived while flying is absolutely incredible.”
SpaceX is developing the Starship to help humanity settle on the moon and Marsand for various other tasks of space flight, such as its construction Starlink A broadband megaconstellation in low Earth orbit.
NASA has a big stake in the vehicle, selecting Starship to be its first manned landing Artemis program of lunar exploration. If all goes according to plan, Starship will put NASA astronauts on the moon for the first time in late 2026. Artemis 3 mission
SpaceX is working to get Starship up and running as soon as possible, and test flights are a big part of that effort. The megarocket has flown six times—in April and November of 2023, and in March, June, October, and November of this year—and the cadence is likely to increase significantly in the near future.
It’s musk apparently intended 25 Starship will launch in 2025 and 100 years later. Those numbers may seem optimistic, but SpaceX has already launched 113 missions. Falcon 9 rocket until 2024. And the regulatory environment — which Musk has opposed it repeatedly in recent months — could soon calm down a lot, given Trump’s stated goals and apparent closeness to the SpaceX founder and CEO.
These test missions are designed to pave the way for ambitious rides, and soon, if all goes according to plan.
“Each of these flights is one step closer to a fully functioning Starship that will take us beyond Earth’s orbit, and with the pace of our rapid iteration here, the moon and Mars are not as far in the future as we think.” Tic said today. “In fact, we plan to send Starships to Mars as soon as 2026, which is when the next transfer window to Mars opens.”
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