Launch of SpaceX’s Starship was canceled – 04/17/2023 – Science

SpaceX canceled the launch of the Starship, the most powerful rocket in history, which would take place this Monday (17). A problem with a valve that was frozen during launch preparations meant that Elon Musk’s company chose not to continue with the operation.

With the launch base in Boca Chica, Texas, SpaceX had scheduled the launch for 9 am, Brasilia time. But the forecast changed, and the company intended to take off at 10:20 am, which did not happen after the technical problem in the final minutes of preparation.

On Twitter, Elon Musk posted what happened. “A pressurization valve appears to be frozen, so unless it starts operating soon there will be no launch today,” he said. The valve really didn’t work, and the launch was canceled

The equipment is considered to be the most powerful in history. It is 120 meters long and has broken space transport capacity records of more than a hundred tons into space – something like taking a Boeing 747 with a full cargo area.

It surpasses, for example, the SLS, launched in November as the most powerful in the world in operation, and the Saturn V, used in the 1960s and 1970s by the American space program for the Apollo lunar missions.

If it achieves success in other attempts, the first Starship flight, in practice, changes the rules of the game in the competition between the space powers: until today, the effort concentrates on making satellites and payloads as small and light as possible. Now, the diameter of nine meters and the capacity for larger and heavier loads promises to make it simpler to build a base on the Moon, for example.

A host of other applications could become possible, such as transporting people and cargo from point to point anywhere on Earth in less than an hour. The Pentagon is even considering the possibility of using the Starship as a means of transport for its military operations.

The ambition of Elon Musk’s company is for the system to be fully reusable, with the two stages (a booster, called Super Heavy, and the ship itself, Starship) capable of landing autonomously.

The Starship is already contracted by NASA to transport the Artemis 3 and 4 missions, a program that intends to take astronauts back to the lunar surface.

By defining that it would acquire a manned landing module for the Artemis program through competition, the American space agency left behind more conservative designs (such as Blue Origin, by Jeff Bezos) and more traditional companies (such as the giant Boeing) when opting for the SpaceX program.

The Starship program was born as an independent initiative of SpaceX, and with another name: Interplanetary Transport System. This is the system with which Musk hopes to one day promote the colonization of Mars.

For that to happen, the cost of each launch needs to drop dramatically, which is only possible if the vehicles are cheap, reusable, require a lot of maintenance between flights, can be refueled in space and are capable of using fuel easily produced on the red planet.

These were the requirements that guided the conception of the Starship: a huge vehicle, with no less than 33 engines in the first stage (the largest number ever used in a rocket), powered by liquid methane and oxygen. That’s because it’s simple to produce them from water and carbon dioxide, two natural resources abundantly available on Mars.