What is the next step for the mega-rocket?
First Launch of a Spacecraft-Based Lunar Landing Mission With a Hot Booster: Onboard the Spacecraft Starship Explosion
NASA administrator Bill Nelson congratulated SpaceX on the test flight, saying that it was “an opportunity to learn — then fly again”. The agency is working with another aerospace company, Blue Origin in Kent, Washington, to develop a lunar lander for future Moon visits.
For the first two moon landings, NASA has hired a company called SpaceX with contracts worth more than $4 billion. After more than fifty years since the last lunar visit, astronauts will be brought to the moon in two different years.
SpaceX, which is headquartered in Hawthorne, California, has ambitious dreams of using Starship to send humans to Mars. But the company’s most important client is NASA, which has given SpaceX contracts worth more than US$4 billion to develop Starship for ferrying astronauts and supplies to the Moon. A lot of steps remain before it is known whether the craft is safe to land on the moon. Milestones include completing suborbital and orbital flights without astronauts on board, as well as showing that the craft can refuel itself in low Earth orbit from other Starship tankers.
On 18 November, its Starship spacecraft launched successfully from Boca Chica, Texas, and travelled farther than it had on previous test flights. It is the first time that it has managed to go into space. The craft exploded over the Gulf of Mexico almost eight minutes after it went up, after the self-destruct function was switched on.
The first major test flight of Starship ended in an explosion, but in its latest attempt, it performed better than it did. The rocket booster lit all 33 engines, which hadn’t done so in April. The launch pad and environment did not suffer severe damage from last time. Perhaps most importantly, the rocket booster and Starship made it past the point at which they separate. In this rare example of a ‘hot staging’ process, the craft’s engines were deliberately ignited earlier than usual while Starship was separating from its booster.
NASA needs to prove its worth, if it wants to place astronauts on the moon later this decade. It might need at least 15 Starships to pull it off. No successful flights have been demonstrated yet.
The Discovery of a Spaceship Booster that Exploded from the Launch Pads of an Elliptical, Massive Starship in Outer Space
The rocket booster that carried the spaceship blew up minutes later when it separated from the craft. Any future tests will need to be approved by the US Federal Aviation Administration.
The flight test got off to a good start. The rocket blasted off without causing damage to the launch pads like it did during the April launch. SpaceX listed several other technical milestones in an update posted today on the company’s website: Among them, that all 33 Raptor engines worked. Six hadn’t worked correctly during the April test flight. Starship then successfully separated from the Super Heavy booster—again an improvement over April, when the stack failed to separate and began to tumble. “This was the first time this technique has been done successfully with a vehicle of this size,” SpaceX officials wrote in their post.
The booster exploded after stage separation, rather than landing in a controlled way. Then near the end of the second-stage burn but before engine cut off, an unknown issue triggered the Starship spacecraft’s automated termination system, exploding it. SpaceX mission control said it had lost contact with the rocket. The company didn’t address what caused the rocket to self-destruct or what caused the lost signal but it did reply to WIRED’s requests for comment. Even so, there was a delay between the actual explosion and the moment the terminated system was activated. This time, the self-destruct system worked correctly. The vehicle reached a altitude of about 150 kilometers, and according to the post, it was the first Starship to reach outer space.
