The hugeness of SpaceX super heavy spacecraft The most powerful rocket ever built took off on its third test flight Thursday morning. The goal of the test was to propel the unpiloted upper stage into space in a suborbital hop, leading to a controlled re-entry and splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
The giant rocket's 33 Raptor engines sucked in 40,000 pounds of liquid oxygen and methane propellant every second, coming to life with an earth-shaking roar at 9:25 a.m. EDT, then quickly throttled up to provide liftoff thrust. reached.
Moments later, the 394-foot-tall rocket began to rise skyward, blowing away billowing clouds of dust and steam created by the booster's violent exhaust and spraying upwards at the bottom of its pad to cushion the impact of engine ignition. A torrent of water was evaporated.
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Smoothly accelerating as it consumed propellant and lost weight, the supersized spacecraft arced east over the Gulf of Mexico, carrying thousands of local residents, tourists, and people from the launch site and nearby south. They put on a spectacular show in front of a large crowd of journalists watching. Padre Island is a few miles north.
All 33 Raptors appeared to fire successfully, pushing the rocket beyond the region of maximum aerodynamic stress as it accelerated to the speed of sound and exited the dense lower atmosphere.
Two minutes and 42 seconds after liftoff, the Raptors began a planned shutdown, and seconds later the Starship's upper stage's six engines ignited, with boosters still attached. This is a recent modification known as “hot staging.” The next moment, the Super Heavy Stage and Starship Stage were separated neatly.
The booster then turned around and began heading back toward shore, making a controlled descent and splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico. The starship continued toward space.
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The Starship Raptors completed their scheduled shutdown eight and a half minutes after liftoff. Re-entry into the Indian Ocean and splashdown was expected in about an hour.
Problems with the previous test flight
The past two test flights ended in spectacular suicide fires — firstlast April, after multiple outages of the super heavy engine and failure of stage separation. SecondIn November, Starship was about to begin its orbit around Earth, with a planned splashdown in the Pacific Ocean north of Hawaii.
SpaceX engineers modified multiple systems in the wake of the failure. This included strengthening the rocket's self-destruct system, improving engine performance, and protecting the pad with a high-power water immersion system that would also reduce the acoustic shock of engine ignition. .
The company also introduced a “hot staging” technology in which the Starship's six Raptor engines ignite while the stage is attached to the super heavy booster. Hot staging, used for decades on Russian Soyuz rockets, helps ensure a more efficient stage separation sequence.
“Starship's second flight test achieved many major milestones and provided valuable data to continue Starship's rapid development,” SpaceX said on its website. “This rapid iterative development approach is the basis for all of SpaceX's major innovative advances.”
For the third test flight, the main goals were much the same: to push Starship into space for a suborbital test flight and high-speed atmospheric entry, and to perform a controlled landing on both stages of the superheavy ship in the Gulf. It was something to do. Starship in Mexico and the Indian Ocean.
SpaceX has pioneered technology that allows small Falcon 9 boosters to be recovered and reused. But no spacecraft has ever attempted to return from space through the atmosphere, exposing the insulating tiles in its belly to temperatures of more than 3,000 degrees.
Both stages are designed to be fully reusable, but there was no recovery plan for the third test flight. Both stages were expected to attempt a rocket-powered descent mimicking an actual landing procedure, but both were expected to break apart and sink on ocean impact.
While Starship was sailing toward approach, flight controllers planned to test the payload door that would be used on future flights to launch Starlink satellites.
More importantly for NASA, the rocket would move cryogenic propellant from one tank to another in the weightless environment of space and attempt the first restart of a Raptor engine outside the atmosphere.
The propellant transfer test and Raptor restart are important milestones for NASA. NASA is paying SpaceX billions of dollars to build a Starship variant to serve as the human landing system (HLS) for the agency's Artemis moon program.
At HLS, multiple superheavy spacecraft tankers will self-refuel in Earth orbit before restarting their engines to head to the Moon, and the arrival of the astronauts will use the spacecraft to transport them back and forth to the surface. need to wait.
Each HLS flight to the moon will require up to 10 refueling flights.
largest rocket ever built
Although clearly a challenge, fully reusable superheavy Starships (collectively known simply as “Starships”) are a potential game changer and could be used in orbit while significantly reducing costs. is a potentially revolutionary step aimed at increasing the payload weight of.
It is the largest rocket ever built, standing 39 stories tall, 29.5 feet wide, and producing more than 16 million pounds of thrust from its SpaceX-designed Raptor engine. This is twice his power output of NASA's Space Launch System moon rocket or NASA's legendary Saturn 5. .
Super Heavy's first stage alone is 23 stories tall, but Starship's upper stage, designed to carry cargo, passengers, or both, is an additional 164 feet tall and powered by six of its own Raptor engines. We are prepared.
After lifting Starship's upper stage out of the lower atmosphere, Super Heavy will fly to a launch pad at either Boca Chica or the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, then descend to touchdown and be captured by two giant robotic arms on the ground. It is designed to be Firing gantry.
The spacecraft is designed to fly so that it can land anywhere a landing pad is available, not just the Moon and eventually Mars.
SpaceX launched its supersized spacecraft on its maiden flight on April 20 last year, but the rocket suffered multiple engine failures and shutdowns. The remainder continued firing after the expected downtime, and the first and second stages were unable to separate successfully. The self-destruct system was activated, but it took longer than expected to activate.
The rocket visibly tipped over and self-destructed four minutes after liftoff. Maximum altitude was 24 miles.
During the second test flight on November 18 last year, the Super Heavy booster operated normally, the hot staging procedure worked as planned, and the Starship upper stage successfully separated and was powered by six Raptor engines into space. continued to rise.
Meanwhile, the Super Heavy predictably turned around and began flying toward the Texas coast for a water landing. But shortly after turning, the rocket exploded in a rain of debris. The Starship stage took off into space as planned, but just before or during the engine shutdown, it too exploded.
Regularly flying super large spacecraft NASA's Artemis Moon Project. NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract in 2021 to develop an improved version of the Starship upper stage to carry astronauts from lunar orbit to the lunar surface and back. The Artemis crew will use the Lockheed Martin Orion capsule to travel to the moon and back.
NASA's contract requires astronauts to conduct one unpiloted test flight to the moon before attempting an actual landing. Artemis management is targeting the first lunar landing with astronauts on board by the end of 2026.
But that depends on whether SpaceX launches enough super-large spacecraft flights to prove its reliability. SpaceX's philosophy is to fly often, learn from mistakes, and fly again, but NASA will need successive long-term flights before it is safe to carry astronauts. be.
