Watch SpaceX launch Starship’s sixth test flight

It was launched by SpaceX sixth test flight of its Starship rocket on Tuesday, as the company looks to keep the momentum going with development of the massive vehicle.

The rocket lifted off from SpaceX’s private “Starbase” facility near Brownsville, Texas. There were no people on the Starship flight.

The starship reached space and traveled to the center of the Earth before re-entering the atmosphere and splashing down in the Indian Ocean.

SpaceX aimed to return the rocket’s “Super Heavy” thruster, separate it from the Starship and land it in the arms of the company’s launch tower. But SpaceX said in its webcast that the booster failed to clear the “engagement criteria” required for a capture attempt, so the booster splashed into the Gulf of Mexico.

As with each previous test flight, SpaceX is pushing development further by testing additional Starship capabilities, including firing an engine in space and testing new heat shield elements.

Also, the afternoon launch time meant that it was the first time that Starship had seen daylight in the Indian Ocean.

SpaceX has so far flown the entire Starship rocket system in six spaceflight tests since April 2023, at an ever-increasing cadence. It appeared in its previous presentation last month first dramatic catch booster of the rocket more than 20 stories high.

After the successful fifth flight, the Federal Aviation Administration confirmed that SpaceX was cleared to proceed with the sixth flight.

But, as with previous test flights, the fifth launch was uneventful. SpaceX management, in audio posted by Musk after the launch on social media, said that Starship’s booster nearly missed its launch due to a timing problem with one of the capture rocket’s subsystems.

“We were about a second away from tripping and telling the rocket to abort and try to crash into the ground near the tower instead of (landing) on ​​the tower — like telling a healthy rocket not to try that capture.” the unidentified person told Musk in the audio.

SpaceX never recaptured the booster. The company said on its website that it made hardware upgrades to improve the redundancy of the rocket’s booster and improve structural strength.

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.

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, which is 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.