SpaceX Starship disintegrates after completing most of third test flight | Top Vip News

SpaceX’s Starship rocket, designed to eventually send astronauts to the Moon and beyond, completed nearly a full test flight through space on its third attempt Thursday, going further than ever before, but disintegrated on its return to Earth. Land.

During a webcast of the flight, SpaceX commentators said mission control lost communication with Starship from two satellite systems simultaneously as the spacecraft reentered the planet’s atmosphere at hypersonic speed.

At the time, the spacecraft was approaching a planned landing in the Indian Ocean, about an hour after launch from south Texas.

Contact with Starship was cut moments after a live video feed from a vehicle-mounted camera showed high-definition images of a reddish glow enveloping the silver spacecraft from the heat of reentry friction as it hurtled toward the earth.

A few minutes later, SpaceX confirmed that the spacecraft had been “lost”—that is, incinerated or destroyed—during the stress of reentry.

For reasons that remained unclear, SpaceX opted to skip one of the main objectives of the test flight: an attempt to restart one of Starship’s Raptor engines while cruising in a shallow orbit. That milestone is considered key to its future success.

Still, the achievement of many of Starship’s planned flight goals represented progress in developing a spacecraft crucial to the growing satellite launch business of SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk in 2002, and the company’s lunar program. POT.

NASA chief Bill Nelson congratulated SpaceX on what he called “a successful test flight” in a statement posted on social media platform X. The US space agency is SpaceX’s largest customer.

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell wrote in an X post that the test marked an “amazing day.”

The two-stage spacecraft, consisting of the Starship cruiser mounted atop its towering Super Heavy rocket booster, lifted off from the company’s Starbase launch site near Boca Chica Village on the Texas Gulf Coast. The upper stage Starship reached maximum altitudes of 145 miles (234 km).

The spacecraft far surpassed its two previous performances, both interrupted by explosions minutes after launch. The company had recognized in advance a high probability that its final flight would end in the same way with the spacecraft disappearing before the mission profile was finalized.

SpaceX’s engineering culture, considered more risk-tolerant than many of the aerospace industry’s more established players, is based on a flight-testing strategy that takes spacecraft to the point of failure and then fine-tune improvements through frequent repetitions. .

ENGINEERING OBJECTIVES

Thursday’s flight achieved many of the engineering objectives set for the mission: repeating the successful stage separation during initial ascent; the first test of Starship’s ability to open and close its payload door in orbit; and the transfer of supercooled rocket propellant from one tank to another during space flights.

What SpaceX failed to demonstrate, besides Starship’s reentry failure and skipped engine restart test, was an attempt to fly the Super Heavy rocket back to Earth, part of SpaceX’s routine strategy to recover its boosters. release for reuse.

SpaceX officials have said they plan to conduct at least six more Starship test flights this year, subject to regulatory approval.

The company must investigate each failure of the test mission and submit its findings and corrective actions to the Federal Aviation Administration for approval before the vehicle can fly again.

Overall, Thursday’s test covered a fraction of the remaining demonstrations and missions the vehicle must perform before proving it is safe enough to carry people to space.

Still, Musk is counting on Starship to meet his goal of producing a large, multipurpose next-generation spacecraft capable of sending people and cargo to the moon later this decade and ultimately flying to Mars.

Closer to home, Musk also sees Starship eventually replacing the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as the workhorse in the company’s commercial launch business. It already lifts most of the world’s satellites and other payloads into low-Earth orbit.

NASA also has a lot riding on the success of Starship, which the agency gives a central role in its Artemis program, successor to the Apollo missions that first took astronauts to the Moon more than 50 years ago.

While NASA executives have adopted Musk’s frequent flight testing approach, agency officials in recent months have made clear their desire to see greater progress in Starship development as the United States competes with China towards the lunar surface.