SpaceX’s Starship rocket will be launched for the 3rd time – 03/13/2024 – Science

SpaceX is preparing for the third test flight of its Starship vehicle, with which NASA hopes to take astronauts to the surface of the Moon later this decade. Elon Musk’s company said it hopes to carry out the flight by the end of this week, from Starbase, the company’s facility in Boca Chica, Texas. Initially, we are working on the possibility of launching the vehicle this Thursday (14).

The flight is still pending authorization from the FAA (the agency that regulates aviation and commercial space launches in the United States), but last month representatives from the entity said they hope to have a new license for flight ready by mid-March, which matches the plans. of the company.

This third flight will have a different profile than the other two and, despite being shorter, it will be more complex and require additional tests.

In the first two attempts, carried out in April and November last year, the plan was to carry out a flight of around 90 minutes – a “quasi-orbit” – with a natural re-entry over the Pacific Ocean, close to Hawaii.

It is worth remembering that on neither occasion was this plan followed to the letter. In the first attempt, in April, multiple engine failures even before the stages separated put an end to the flight. In the second, the second stage reached space, but showed anomalous behavior shortly before the end of the propellant burn and self-destructed. The first stage was also lost, shortly after separation, due to difficulty re-igniting the engines with fuel shaking violently inside the tanks.

Following SpaceX’s development pattern, which involves early testing and failures to identify and correct design problems early, each mission goes a little further than the last. On his X (formerly Twitter) account, Musk said that the chance that the rocket will reach orbit on this third flight is almost 80%.

This time, instead of lasting 90 minutes, the idea is that the mission will last around 65 – with the first test of re-igniting the second stage engines to be carried out in space, during a controlled burn that will lead the spacecraft to re-enter. in the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean. It is a maneuver not foreseen in the previous two flights and which will be essential in the next ones, as the Starship’s objective is to be completely reusable, with recovery of the first and second stages.

A second additional test included in the orbital phase of the flight is fuel transfer. For Starship to fulfill its mission of taking astronauts to the surface of the Moon, it will need to demonstrate the ability to refuel it in orbit – something never done for vehicles of this scale.

It will not be this time that it will dock with another Starship to directly transfer fuel from one to another, but SpaceX will carry out a preliminary test to observe the behavior of the refueling process when transferring propellant from one tank to another, within the same vehicle. .

And the third new feature added to the test will be the opening and closing of the vehicle’s cargo door. It will not be present in the version of Starship that will take astronauts to the Moon, but it is essential to SpaceX’s plans to use the new rocket as a capable satellite transporter into orbit. The continued success of the Starlink project, which uses a satellite network to provide internet on a global scale, is linked to the good performance of Starship.

In the medium term, SpaceX hopes to replace its main operating rockets (Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy) with Starship, which, despite being the largest and most powerful launcher ever built, would be fully reusable and more capable and cheaper than its predecessors. capable of taking more than a hundred tons at a time to Earth orbit (or even to the Moon or Mars, with orbital refueling).

The company also hopes that routine Starship flights with Starlink satellites, such as those taking place with the Falcon 9, will quickly enable the vehicle to be qualified for manned missions, which require higher safety certification.

In this process, there are technical and bureaucratic barriers. In the constant tug-of-war it is waging with the FAA, the company has already announced that it intends to carry out up to seven Starship flights this year (as of March). Detail: the environmental license obtained for the operation of the rocket in Boca Chica provided for a maximum of just five. SpaceX is betting that the demonstration of its launch pad deluge system, successfully tested on the second flight, will contain any environmental damage and allow for greater frequency of flights in the future.

The company is in a race against time if it wants to meet the deadline (recently extended by NASA) for the first manned mission to the surface of the Moon this century, currently scheduled for the end of 2026. Many flights and technical demonstrations will be needed ( including a successful landing and takeoff on the Moon without a crew) until that can happen. To give you an idea, just to fuel a Starship completely in Earth orbit, SpaceX engineers estimate that around ten launches will be needed (and this is an optimistic calculation).

But of course, the rocket could become commercially operational for satellite launches well before then. If the objectives of this third flight are successfully met, the path will already be open for the flight of payloads with it on future missions.