SpaceX launches Starship, the most powerful rocket in history – 04/20/2023 – Science

SpaceX launched for the first time this Thursday (20) the Starship, the most powerful rocket in history. The equipment has 120 meters and broke capacity records in space transport.

The first test flight was scheduled for this past Monday (17), but was postponed in the last few minutes due to a pressurization problem in the propulsion stage, according to information from SpaceX.

In the phase where the two stages of the rocket would be separated in two, there was a problem and it did not happen. The vehicle, then, had to be destroyed remotely in the first minutes of flight. However, since the beginning of the operation, it was foreseen that the Starship would not be reused.

The release from Boca Chica, Texas, inaugurates what promises to become a new stage in the history of space exploration. The vehicle makes it possible to transport 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.

The success of Starship’s first flight, in practice, changes the rules of the game in competition between space powers: to this day, the effort is focused 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.

For the inaugural launch, ambitions were more modest. The company announced that it would be satisfied if the rocket managed to leave the launch pad safely, and everything that came afterwards was taken as profit by the engineers involved in the project.

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.