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SpaceX has successfully launched the world’s tallest and most powerful rocket into space for the first time.
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But Starship lost communication with SpaceX during its return to the Indian Ocean.
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NASA wants Starship to land astronauts on the moon. Elon Musk wants it to build a city on Mars.
SpaceX’s mega-rocket Starship finally thundered through the sky, past the stratosphere and into space on Thursday morning.
It was a spectacular conclusion to years of secret development, explosive test flights and regulatory hurdles. With the launch, SpaceX has proven that it can not only build the tallest and most powerful rocket on Earth, but also fly it beyond this world.
However, during the scorching fall back to Earth, Starship lost communication with SpaceX, and the company said shortly afterwards that the rocket was lost.
It is possible that the spacecraft was severely damaged or disintegrated by the extreme temperatures caused by its fall through the atmosphere while traveling at more than five times the speed of sound.
Either way, today’s launch is a huge win for the company.
“This is failure at its best. One of SpaceX’s secret sauces is accepting failure as a means to an end,” said Eric Berger, senior space editor at Ars Technica, posted on X.
Elon Musk’s plans to settle on Mars depend not only on the unprecedented power of Starship, but also on its ability to be completely reusable.
In 2002, Musk founded SpaceX with the goal of making spaceflight cheap enough to establish a permanent human settlement on the red planet. This is the rocket that should make that possible.
Musk is also counting on Starship to help blanket the Earth with high-speed Starlink satellite internet, while NASA is banking on the mega-rocket to return astronauts to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years.
Starship has finally proven that it can handle its immense tasks.
Historic flight of the spaceship to orbital heights
Sitting atop its stainless steel Super Heavy booster, Starship stood taller than the Statue of Liberty on the company’s new orbital launch pad in South Texas as a crowd of SpaceX employees cheered, applauded and counted down the clock.
About 8:25 a.m. Central Time, the booster’s array of 33 Raptor engines roared to life, inflating the steel-reinforced launch pad with as much as 16 million pounds of thrust to hoist the rocket past the launch tower and through the sunrise-hued sky above. .
Starship became famous for its explosions. Several early prototypes of the spacecraft exploded during previous test flights. The rocket’s first two attempts to enter orbit also exploded in mid-air, in April and November last year.
“Many of the innovations we’ve developed are the result of our failures,” Siva Bharadwaj, a SpaceX operations engineer, said during the livestream of the launch.
Well, the third time’s the charm. The spacecraft launched Thursday was the first to reach orbital altitudes.
About three minutes after takeoff, Starship fired its engines and separated from its Super Heavy booster, in a risky maneuver called hot staging. As the booster fell back to Earth, Starship continued to climb towards the sky and then shut down its engines to float through space.
“Wow, what a launch, what a hot stage, what an amazing sight to see Starship in space,” SpaceX communications manager Dan Huot said during the company’s livestream.
The spacecraft spent about an hour in orbit around Earth. It then fell back to Earth in a fiery fall through the thick atmosphere.
It reached a terminal velocity of more than 15,500 miles per hour and soon after lost communications about 40 miles above the surface.
Shortly after the communications outage, SpaceX announced that Starship was lost.
Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built
To date, its tallest rockets have been the Saturn V, which launched NASA’s Apollo missions, and the agency’s Space Launch System, which it developed to return astronauts to the moon.
Once fully operational, Starship will be able to transport up to 150 tons (165 US tons) to space via SpaceX. That rises to 250 tons (275 metric tons) if you forego reusability and discard the spaceship when the mission is complete.
To put that in perspective, the most powerful operational rocket right now is SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, which can carry up to 70 tons to low Earth orbit.
Starship and Super Heavy are designed to be completely reusable
Starship-Super Heavy is designed as the world’s first fully reusable launch system. Ultimately, Starship and its booster should both be able to fire their engines as they fall to Earth, lowering themselves to an upright landing on solid ground or ocean ships so they can fly again another day.
However, that technological milestone will have to wait.
During Thursday’s flight, SpaceX did not test these full reusable capabilities. The booster splashed into the water and Starship lost communication with SpaceX, so it is unclear whether it reached the Indian Ocean or exploded during reentry.
Reusability is an integral part of SpaceX’s mission to reduce the cost of spaceflight.
The company has already achieved partial reusability with its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters, which land safely back on Earth after launching payloads into orbit. But their upper stages are discarded after launch.
Landing both rocket stages safely back on Earth to fly again another day is a new level of technical complexity never before achieved, Musk said at the Morgan Stanley conference in March 2023. If SpaceX succeeds, this will change commercial spaceflight forever.
“It will probably take us a few more years to achieve full and rapid reusability,” Musk said at the time, adding that reusability was “the profound breakthrough needed to expand life beyond Earth.”
Starship has already demonstrated that it can launch and land itself for reuse, a feat you can see for yourself in the video below.
A spaceship could take NASA back to the moon
A spaceship entering orbit around the Earth is also an important stepping stone on the way back to the moon.
Although NASA’s SLS rocket is intended as a workhorse for its new Artemis moon program, the agency has enough confidence in SpaceX to tag Starship for a crucial part of its upcoming missions: returning astronauts to the moon’s surface.
The agency has awarded SpaceX $4 billion to convert the spacecraft into a reliable lunar landing vehicle.
SLS is supposed to take astronauts to lunar orbit, but Starship is the vehicle NASA has chosen to take humans to the moon’s surface for the first time since 1972. That mission, called Artemis III, could take place sometime this decade.
Later, Starship could support NASA’s construction of a permanent base on the moon.
Musk’s ultimate goal is much bigger: Ultimately, the billionaire has said he wants to build 1,000 spaceships to fly 100,000 people a year to Mars, build a city there and make humans the first multi-planetary species in human history. to make earth.
SpaceX has high expectations for Starship
Musk expects Starship’s fully reusable capability will translate into big savings and faster turnaround time between launches, because SpaceX would be able to reuse its rockets instead of having to rebuild them for each launch.
SpaceX also hopes to use Starship to launch massive amounts of satellites into orbit. And Musk has said the giant rocket could be transported from point to point on Earth, ferrying passengers anywhere in the world in an hour or less.
SpaceX has another unique plan to fly the largest payloads in history into deep space.
For maximum efficiency, the company aims to build “tanker ships,” which can refuel a Mars-bound spaceship in Earth’s orbit, replenishing the massive amounts of fuel the rocket must burn to propel itself past the atmosphere.
This would allow the spacecraft to carry more cargo to Mars – up to 100 tons, according to SpaceX.
By comparison, the rockets that launched the Apollo missions, the Saturn Vs fleet, could send 130 tons into Earth orbit and only 50 tons to the moon. NASA’s new moon rocket, SLS, could send 46 tons into orbits beyond the moon.
The hope is that Starship’s massive capacity will allow SpaceX to transport all the necessary materials to build a settlement on the red planet and then populate it. According to SpaceX, one spaceship should be able to transport a hundred people to Mars.
SpaceX’s tankers – essentially windowless, fuel-filled spaceships – could also be reusable.
All that efficiency and power will be needed to bring Musk’s fantastic Mars dreams within financial reach.
Read the original article on Business Insider