SpaceX launches Starship, which reaches orbit and is lost – 03/14/2024 – Science

SpaceX has successfully carried out the third orbital profile launch of its Starship vehicle, intended to take humans to the surface of the Moon later this decade. The flight departed from Starbase, the company’s hub in Boca Chica, Texas (United States), at 10:25 am this Thursday (14).

It was the first successful test, compared to the first two carried out last year.

As was the case in the second flight, the engines of the first stage (the Super Heavy), powered by liquid methane and oxygen, worked satisfactorily until separation, and the second stage (the spacecraft itself, also called Starship) made its climb to orbit, completed in about eight and a half minutes.

This surpassed the result obtained in the second flight, carried out in November last year and ended by the self-destruction system of the second stage after an anomaly in the engines at the end of the burn, shortly before reaching a “quasi-orbital” trajectory, which would lead to natural reentry over the Pacific about 90 minutes after liftoff.

During its stay in space, Starship conducted some technological tests, such as opening and closing the cargo area door and transferring propellant from one tank to another – actions necessary for the future use of the vehicle to send satellites to space. orbit and its refueling in space to carry out manned lunar missions.

The reentry of the second stage took place as planned, over the Indian Ocean, almost an hour after takeoff, but the vehicle was lost in the end and there was no landing in the water.

The first stage also arrived in the ocean, but in the Atlantic, but much earlier: seven minutes after takeoff.

With this, the first preliminary controlled landing tests of the two stages, which descended into the water and are not expected to be recovered by SpaceX (as planned), were successfully completed.

SpaceX expects to make another six Starship launches this year – which is still not enough to qualify all of the vehicle’s new technologies and enable its use in NASA’s Artemis 3 mission, aimed at taking astronauts to the surface of the Moon.

It is estimated that it will take at least ten launches in rapid succession for the in-orbit refueling required for a round-trip lunar mission, and the company expects to have completed about a hundred Starship flights before putting a crew on it. It will be challenging to achieve this by the end of 2026, when Artemis 3 is scheduled. It is a good bet that it will be delayed.

In any case, the success of this third flight in reaching orbit already demonstrates the operational condition of the largest and most powerful rocket ever built in history – the herald of a new era in the conquest of space.