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The company achieved an ambitious set of goals on the fourth test flight of a vehicle that is central to Elon Musk’s vision of sending people to Mars.
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“We have the takeoff. ” The vehicle is downgrading. “The Starship remains on an access path. “
By Kenneth Chang
SpaceX’s launch of its giant Starship rocket on Thursday fulfilled a series of ambitious goals that Elon Musk, the company’s chief executive, had set ahead of the flight, the fourth.
Taking off from SpaceX’s launch pad at 7:50 a. m. in South Texas, near Brownsville, Starship rumbled in the sky.
After moving away from the upper stage, the booster was able to land softly in the Gulf of Mexico, while the second-stage spacecraft traveled halfway around the world, surviving the high temperatures of its re-entry into the atmosphere and also making a controlled landing. . , in the Indian Ocean.
The flight was not the best and serious technical obstacles remain. These successes, which surpass those achieved in the last control flight in March, give hope that Musk will be able to realize his vision of a rocket that is the largest and most resistant. never created, but completely reusable.
The result is also helping to validate the company’s “break and repair” engineering approach, with steady progress since the first verification version in April last year, when the rocket had to be intentionally destroyed because it deviated from its trajectory.
“They are demonstrating their ability to progress faster than we would have thought,” said Daniel L. Dumbacher, executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, a pro-engineering society. “They have a team that knows what they’re doing. “”He has the ability, he’s willing to learn, and equally important, he’s rarely beholden to the assumptions of the past. “
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