SpaceX’s latest test flight of its Starship vehicle on Tuesday got off to a sobering start as the company was unable to recover the enormous booster stage of the rocket, the most powerful ever built. But about an hour later, the vehicle’s upper stage was more successful as it completed a daring maneuver to splash down in the Indian Ocean.
It’s not unusual for a test launch to be unable to achieve all of its goals. But after a successful test flight last month, SpaceX’s most recent attempt experienced a partial setback that suggests the company has some work left to do as it pursues rapid reusability of the vehicle. That is a prerequisite for the pipe dream of the company’s founder, Elon Musk, of sending people to Mars in the years ahead.
“Development testing, by definition, is unpredictable,” said Jessica Anderson, a manufacturing engineering manager at SpaceX and one host of the live broadcast. “But that is exactly why we test.”
The rocket lifted off on time at 4 p.m. Central time from a launch site in South Texas along the Gulf of Mexico. President-elect Donald J. Trump observed the flight’s start from a nearby location.
A goal of the flight had been for Super Heavy, the large booster stage, to snap back into its original place on the tower it lifted off from, as it did in October, caught by a pair of mechanical “chopsticks.” But after an initial “go for catch” command minutes into the flight, an updated command was given for the booster to skip the complicated maneuver, and it instead performed a smoky splashdown into the Gulf of Mexico.
SpaceX has not yet provided a reason for the last-minute change, though
While the booster did not make it back to the launch tower , the rocket’s upper stage traveled on for about an hour. It achieved an important objective of the test flight as it traveled through space toward the Indian Ocean. Around 35 minutes into the journey, SpaceX engineers reignited one of Starship’s engines in space for the first time, a crucial step for future orbital flights of the vehicle.
Plasma built up beneath the spacecraft as it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, surrounding the vehicle in a colorful glow.
Moments later, flaps on the Starship vehicle steered the spacecraft first into a nosedive. The flaps, with the help of the rocket’s engines, then steered it back into a vertical orientation similar to the position it may assume when it returns to the launchpad for future flights.
“Starship has landed,” an engineer said calmly from the control room, as the vehicle’s plunge into the water was met with whistles and cheers from viewers in the crowd.
What is Starship?
The Starship rocket system is the largest ever built — 397 feet tall, or about 90 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty including the pedestal.
And it has the most engines ever in a rocket booster: The Super Heavy booster — the bottom part of the rocket — has 33 of SpaceX’s powerful Raptor engines sticking out of its bottom. As those engines lifted Starship off the launchpad in South Texas, they generated 16 million pounds of thrust at full throttle.
The upper part, also called Starship or Ship for short, looks like a shiny rocket from science fiction movies of the 1950s, made of stainless steel with large fins. This is the upper stage that will head toward orbit, and ultimately could carry people to the moon or even Mars.
How is the sixth flight different from the last launch?
In most ways, the sixth flight aimed to be a repeat of the fifth flight.
One difference was that SpaceX restarted one of the engines on the upper-stage Starship during its one-hour flight through space. That is a capability that will be needed to bring a future Starship back to the ground from orbit.
As with earlier test flights, the vehicle for Tuesday’s flight did not enter orbit but instead traveled on a suborbital path that, by design, took it on a collision course with the middle of the Indian Ocean. That way, if anything went wrong, the rocket would still splash down harmlessly in the water.
The ship belly-flopped into the atmosphere to slow down and then pivoted to a vertical position as if it were landing.
There wre other tweaks to the rocket and flight plans.
The company announced during the livestream that a plush banana was placed in the vehicle’s cargo hold.
Thermal tiles on the surface of Starship’s underside protect it from the heat of re-entry. On this flight, SpaceX deliberately left off tiles on entire sections of Starship’s underside. That was to test secondary heat protection materials that aim to prevent heat from burning through the rocket skin if some tiles fall off.
On Tuesday, it performed a stress test of the ship’s steering flaps by falling nose down during the final part of its descent, after it slows below the speed of sound.
Previous Starship launches occurred early in the morning. This flight launched in the afternoon so that it was daylight in the Indian Ocean, allowing better observations of Starship’s landing.
The entire flight took a little more than one hour.
How could the 2024 election result affect Starship and SpaceX?
The pace of Starship flights could pick up, and Mr. Trump has promised to streamline regulatory procedures.
Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder, has complained that the pace of testing of the vehicle has been slowed through unnecessary environmental reviews by the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates private space launches, and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.
The new administration could also speed up Mr. Musk’s dreams of using Starship to send people to Mars.
Currently, NASA is planning to use a version of Starship as a lander that would take astronauts back to the moon. But Mr. Trump could shift NASA’s focus to sending astronauts to the red planet instead.
Mr. Musk has said SpaceX planned to launch uncrewed Starships to Mars in 2026 to test its ability to land there, and if successful, people could be aboard for a future opportunity. Earth and Mars align every 26 months.
Mr. Musk has also suggested that the F.A.A. under Mr. Trump could allow Starship to conduct suborbital flights taking passengers halfway around the world in half an hour.
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