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By Joe Skipper, Steve Gorman and Joey Roulette
BOCA CHICA, Texas, March 14 (Reuters) – SpaceX’s Starship rocket, designed to send astronauts to the moon and beyond, completed a near-full test flight in space on Thursday in its third test, farther than ever before, but disintegrated. their return to Earth.
During a webcast of the flight, SpaceX commentators said that control of the project lost communication with Starship from two satellite systems when the spacecraft re-entered the planet’s environment at hypersonic speed.
At the time, the spacecraft was about to land in the Indian Ocean, about an hour after its launch from South Texas.
Contact with Starship was interrupted moments after a live video feed from a camera fixed on the vehicle showed high-definition photographs of a reddish glow engulfing the silver spacecraft due to the heat of re-entry friction as it hurtled toward Earth.
A few minutes later, SpaceX demonstrated that the spacecraft had been “lost,” i. e. , incinerated or damaged, by the re-entry stress.
For reasons that are still unclear, SpaceX decided to skip one of the main objectives of the test flight: trying to restart one of the Starship spacecraft’s Raptor engines as it sailed into a shallow orbit. This step is considered the key to your long-term success.
However, many of Starship’s planned flight goals represented progress in the progression of a spacecraft that is critical to the development of SpaceX’s satellite launch business, founded by Elon Musk in 2002, and NASA’s lunar program.
NASA leader Bill Nelson congratulated SpaceX on what he called “a successful test flight” in a message posted on social media platform X. The U. S. space company is SpaceX’s biggest customer.
SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell wrote in an X article that it marked an “amazing day. “
The double-decker spacecraft, consisting of the Starsend cruiser atop its towering Super Heavy booster rocket, lifted off from the company’s Starbase launch near the town of Boca Chica on the Texas Gulf Coast. The upper stage spacecraft reached maximum altitudes of 145 miles (234 kilometers).
The spacecraft far surpassed its last two performances, either of which was interrupted by explosions minutes after launch. The company had said beforehand that its last flight would most likely end with the spacecraft disappearing before the project profile was completed.
SpaceX’s engineering culture, more risk-tolerant than that of many more established players in the aerospace industry, is based on a flight control strategy that brings spacecraft to the point of failure and then fine-tunes innovations through common repetition.
ENGINEERING OBJECTIVES
Thursday’s flight met many of the technical goals set for the mission: repeating a successful level separation from the initial climb; the first test of Starship’s ability to open and close the door of its in-orbit payload; and the transfer of a supercooled rocket booster from one tank to another spaceflight.
What SpaceX failed to prove, besides the failure of the Starship re-entry and ignored engine re-ignition test, is an attempt to bring the Super Heavy rocket back to Earth, part of the SpaceX regime’s strategy of retrieving its release boosters for reuse. .
SpaceX officials said they plan to conduct at least six more Starship flights this year, subject to regulatory approval.
The company must investigate the failed test project and submit its findings and corrective actions to the Federal Aviation Administration for firm approval before the vehicle can fly again.
Overall, Thursday’s test covered only a fraction of the remaining demonstrations and missions the vehicle will have to complete before it proves enough to carry other people into space.
Still, Musk is counting on Starship to achieve his goal of creating a large, next-generation multipurpose spacecraft capable of sending people and cargo to the Moon by the end of this decade and ultimately flying to Mars.
Closer to home, Musk also sees Starship upgrading the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as a workhorse in the company’s publicity launch activities. It already places the maximum of the world’s satellites and other payloads into low-Earth orbit.
NASA also relies heavily on the good fortune of Starship, to which the company plays a central role in its Artemis program, the good fortune of the Apollo missions that first sent astronauts to the moon more than 50 years ago.
While NASA executives have adopted Musk’s standard for flight testing, company officials have made clear in recent months their preference for seeing further progress in Starship’s progression as the U. S. races with China toward the lunar surface.
(Reporting by Joe Skipper in Boca Chica, Texas, Steve Gorman in Los Angeles and Joey Roulette in Washington; writing by Steve Gorman; editing by Will Dunham and Chizu Nomiyama)