On Sunday morning, SpaceX successfully launched the latest test flight of Starship, the most powerful rocket system ever built that could one day be used to take humans to the moon and Mars.
The Super Heavy rocket booster (with an unmanned Starship on top) lifted off at 8:25 a.m. ET (7:25 a.m. CT) with a 30-minute launch window at At 8 a.m., SpaceX launched from the Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas. The demonstration mission, for the first time, involved an ambitious attempt to maneuver the 232-foot (71-meter) long rocket booster into a giant center after it had burned through most of its fuel and separated from the upper Starship spacecraft. The superheavy rocket was successfully held in place by giant metal tongs, which SpaceX refers to as "chopsticks."
Meanwhile, the Starship spacecraft continued to fly on its own using its six onboard engines before completing a landing maneuver over the Indian Ocean. SpaceX does not intend to recover the upper spacecraft.
Each milestone aims to discuss how SpaceX can one day restart and quickly launch its Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft for future missions. SpaceX aims to drastically reduce the time and cost of launching cargo (or crewed ships) into Earth orbit and deep space, and rapid recycling of rocket parts is considered critical.
SpaceX plans to eventually use the Starship capsule as a lander to carry NASA astronauts to the lunar surface as early as 2026 as part of the Artemis III mission, for which the company has government contracts worth up to $4 billion. Eventually, SpaceX also hopes that Starship will be able to send the first humans to Mars.
Starship development has so far focused on a series of increasingly sophisticated test flights, starting in 2019 with a short jump test of a vehicle nicknamed the "Starhopper," which initially took off just a few centimeters from the ground. Recently, the company has started to get more aggressive with the release of fully assembled Starship capsules and Super Heavy boosters.
The first test launch of the Starship and Super Heavy, called the Integrated Test Flight, will begin in April 2023. The purpose of the launch was simply to remove the 397-foot (121-meter) long vehicle from the launch pad. It exploded minutes after flying over the Gulf of Mexico.
SpaceX is known for serious failures in the early stages of spacecraft development, and says those failures help the company quickly implement design changes that lead to better results.
With each new product launch, the company's goals become more ambitious. The latest test launch, the fourth in SpaceX's extensive test campaign, began in June. Although the booster and spacecraft wings were badly charred and wobbly during the webcast, they survived re-entry into Earth's atmosphere and made landing maneuvers in the ocean, a major step forward. SpaceX took the test a step further by recovering the Super Heavy booster after launch.
Ultimately, SpaceX plans to reuse and recycle the Super Heavy and Starship spacecraft. But discussions about booster recovery are a natural first step, as SpaceX has extensive experience in this area.
SpaceX accomplished the feat by landing a rocket booster on its smallest workhorse Falcon 9 rocket after flight. After more than 330 launches, the rocket boosters have soft-landed on sea platforms or on land, allowing these vehicles to be rebuilt and fly again. SpaceX says this keeps costs down, allowing the company to cut other parts of the rocket market. However, a starship is a more powerful and complex system.
With 33 engines on the Super Heavy's booster base, each more powerful than one of the nine engines used on the Falcon, the Super Heavy is about 10 times larger. Instead of strapping the landing legs to the side of the Super Heavy rocket like the Falcon 9's booster, SpaceX built a special tower to support the Super Heavy rocket as it returns to Earth, which it hopes will speed up the recovery process.
SpaceX CEO Musk has dubbed the tower "Mechazilla" because it resembles Metal Godzilla with its giant metal arms. These arms, or "chopsticks," can be used to stack and move boosters and spacecraft at the launch site before liftoff, and are designed to catch the vehicles in midair as they return to Earth.
Musk's vision is that eventually the chopstick arm will be able to simply turn and return the rocket to the launch pad within minutes of its return, allowing the rocket to take off again after refueling, perhaps as little as 30 minutes after landing, the CEO said. said in an interview on June 5. Starship success probability.
It is a bold vision. SpaceX is still in the early stages of figuring out how recording works. Musk admitted in an interview on YouTube in July that SpaceX's goal for the flight "sounds a little crazy" even though it had a "good chance of success."
"We're not breaking physics," he said, "so success here is one possible outcome."
According to the company's website, SpaceX's criteria for hosting the Super Heavy booster is "to meet the criteria of thousands of different vehicles and launch platforms," which require "systems on the booster and turret to function properly and to be manually commanded by the mission's flight director.".
If the attempt is aborted, the Super Heavy will retry the landing maneuver at sea.
The attempt took place about seven minutes after launch, and the Starship spacecraft glided for nearly an hour before a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean. Musk added that one problem Starship encountered on its fourth test flight in June was the loss of heat shields, or the thousands of small black hexagons attached to the exterior of the spacecraft that are designed to protect the craft from extreme temperatures during reentry. Losing a large number of these tiles severely hampers the vehicle's ability to attempt a soft landing, Musk said.
"Because of the missing tiles ... the front flaps were melted, it was like trying to control it with little skeleton hands," Musk said, adding that the fourth plane landed about 6 miles (9.7 kilometers) from the intended sea spray site. . .) place.
The company said on its website that it "completely redid its heat shield, which SpaceX engineers spent over 12,000 hours replacing with a new generation of ceramic tiles, alternate ablation layers and additional protection between the flap structures. The entire thermal protection system."
This could help starships better survive the brutal reentry process. A successful flight can encourage the company to focus on more ambitious projects. For example, SpaceX has to figure out how to refuel the Starship while it's in orbit. Such maneuvers were necessary to ensure the massive craft had enough fuel to complete its journey to the Moon.
If the company misses its goals or causes significant damage to its launch facilities, it could raise questions about further delays to NASA's lunar landing plans.
Source cnn.com
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