Highlights of the SpaceX spacecraft test flight | Top Vip News

This particular flight was not designed, by design, to circle the Earth completely. At 8:25 a.m. Central Time, Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket to ever fly, lifted off from the south Texas coast. The ascent was smooth and Starship’s upper stage reached orbital speeds. Approximately 45 minutes after launch, it began re-entering the atmosphere, heading toward a splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

Live video, transmitted in near real time via SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, showed red-hot gases heating the underside of the vehicle. Then, 49 minutes after launch, communications with Starship ended and SpaceX later said the vehicle had not survived reentry, presumably disintegrating and falling into the ocean.

Still, Bill Nelson, NASA administrator, congratulated SpaceX for what he called a “successful test flight” of the system his agency relies on for some of its Artemis lunar missions.

SpaceX aims to make both the vehicle’s lower booster and the spacecraft’s upper stage capable of flying again and again, in stark contrast to the single-launch, expendable rockets that have been used for most of the space age. .

That reuse gives SpaceX the potential to reduce the cost of satellites and telescopes, as well as the people and things they need to live in space.

Completing most of the short ride was a reassuring validation that the rocket design appears to be sound. Starship is not only crucial to NASA’s lunar plans, it is the key to Musk’s dream of sending people to live on Mars.

For Musk, the success also goes back to his previous reputation as a technological visionary who led revolutionary advances at Tesla and SpaceX, in contrast to his troubled purchase of Twitter and the polarizing social media quagmire that has followed since he transformed the platform and renamed it X. Even as SpaceX launched its next-generation rocket, the social media company was dueling with Don Lemon, a former CNN anchor who was share clips from a combative interview with Musk.

SpaceX still needs to make a series of formidable rocket firsts before Starship is ready to head to the moon and beyond. Earlier this week, Mr. Musk said It expected to make at least six more Starship flights this year, during which some of those experiments could occur.

But if it achieves them all, the company could once again revolutionize the space transportation business and leave its competitors far behind.

Phil Larson, a White House space adviser during the Obama administration who also previously worked on communications efforts at SpaceX, said Starship’s size and reusability had “enormous potential to change the game in transportation to orbit.” . And it could allow for entirely new kinds of missions.”

NASA is counting on Starship to serve as the lunar lander for Artemis III, a mission that will take astronauts to the surface of the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. That trip is currently scheduled for late 2026, but seems likely to be pushed to 2027 or later.

The third flight was a marked improvement over the first two launch attempts.

Last April, Starship made it off the launch pad, but a cascade of engine failures and propellant fires led to the rocket’s destruction 24 miles above the Gulf of Mexico.

In November, the second Starship launch traveled much further. All 33 engines on the Super Heavy booster functioned correctly during ascent, and after successful separation, Starship’s upper stage nearly reached orbital speeds. However, both stages ended up exploding.

However, Musk hailed both test flights as successes, as they provided data that helped engineers improve the design.

Thursday’s launch, which coincided with the 22nd anniversary of SpaceX’s founding, came 85 minutes into a 110-minute launch window. The booster’s 33 engines ignited at the launch site outside Brownsville, Texas, and lifted the rocket, which was as tall as a 40-story building, into the morning sky.

Most of the flight went smoothly and a number of test objectives were achieved during the flight, such as opening and closing the spacecraft’s payload doors, which will be needed to deliver cargo in the future.

SpaceX did not attempt to recover the booster this time, but did perform engine burns that will be necessary to return to the launch site. However, the final landing of the booster, made over the Gulf of Mexico, was not completely successful, an area that SpaceX will try to fix for future flights.

SpaceX said the Super Heavy disintegrated at an altitude of about 1,500 feet.

SpaceX engineers will also have to figure out why Starship didn’t survive reentry and make corrections to the vehicle’s design.

Even with the partial success of Thursday’s flight, Starship is far from ready to go to Mars, or even the Moon. Because of Musk’s Mars ambitions, Starship is much larger and much more complicated than NASA needs for its Artemis moon landings. For Artemis III, two astronauts will spend about a week in the lunar South Pole region.

“He was priced low,” Daniel Dumbacher, executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a former senior NASA official, said of Musk, “and NASA decided to take on the risk associated with that configuration.” hoping it would work. And we’ll see if that turns out to be true.”

To leave Earth’s orbit, Starship must refill its propellant tanks with liquid methane and liquid oxygen. That will require a complex choreography of additional Starship launches to get the boosters into orbit.

“This is a very, very complicated problem, and there are a lot of things to solve and a lot of things that have to work right,” Dumbacher said.

Thursday’s flight included an initial test of that technology, moving liquid oxygen from one tank to another inside Starship.

Dumbacher doesn’t expect Starship to be ready by September 2026, the launch date NASA currently has for Artemis III, although he didn’t predict how much of a delay there might be. “I’m not going to give an idea because there is too much work, too many problems to solve,” he said.