SpaceX launched its second Starship rocket flight on Saturday, with Elon Musk’s company pushing development of the mammoth vehicle past new milestones.
Lifted off around 8:00 a.m. ET from the company’s facility in Texas, Starship flew for more than seven minutes, successfully separating from its booster before the rocket’s on-board system intentionally destroyed the vehicle in mid-flight
There were no people on board the test flight.
“We’ve lost data from the second stage … what we believe right now is that the automated flight termination system for the second stage appears to have activated very late in the burn,” said John Insprucker, chief engineer for ‘SpaceX integration. on the company’s webcast.
SpaceX’s next-generation spacecraft on its powerful Super Heavy rocket lifts off from the company’s Boca Chica launch pad in an unmanned test flight near Brownsville, Texas, US, on November 18 of 2023.
Joe Skipper | Reuters
The flight termination system is a standard safety feature on rockets, as it destroys the vehicle if a problem arises or if it flies off course. In SpaceX’s webcast, the spacecraft appears to have detonated at an altitude of about 148 kilometers (or about 485,000 feet). That’s a little less than half the altitude at which the International Space Station orbits Earth.
The intentional destruction of Starship represents a premature end to the flight test, as SpaceX planned to fly it most of the way around Earth before re-entering the atmosphere and splashing down on the coast of Kauai. Hawaii.
“An incredibly successful day, even though we had an ‘unscheduled fast teardown’ of both the Super Heavy thruster and the spacecraft,” SpaceX director of quality engineering Kate Tice said in the webcast.
The Federal Aviation Administration confirmed it will oversee a “mishap” investigation into the flight, a standard regulatory procedure, before SpaceX can launch another Starship rocket.
Accident investigations are how the FAA looks at the cause of a rocket launch failure, especially when a vehicle is destroyed. The regulator may give SpaceX corrective actions to complete before the company can receive a license for future Starship launches. The FAA said in a statement after the launch that “no injuries or damage to public property have been reported.”
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson congratulated the company for “moving forward with today’s flight test.”
“Spaceflight is a bold adventure that demands a spirit of power and bold innovation. Today’s test is an opportunity to learn, then fly again,” Nelson said in a social media post.
The FAA cleared SpaceX for the second launch earlier this week.
SpaceX first launched a full Starship rocket system in April. Although this flight did not reach space, it achieved multiple historic firsts for an experimental rocket of an unprecedented scale. The mid-air destruction of the rocket, as well as an investigation into the damage on the ground, triggered a regulatory review that lasted nearly seven months.
The launch attempt comes after fresh backlash against SpaceX CEO Elon Musk over comments he made online. The White House condemned Friday what he called Musk’s “abhorrent promotion of anti-Semitic and racist hatred” on his social media platform, X.
Starship system
Starship is both the tallest and most powerful rocket ever launched. Fully stacked on the Super Heavy booster, Starship is 397 feet tall and about 30 feet in diameter.
The Super Heavy booster, which stands 232 feet tall, is what begins the rocket’s journey into space. At its core are 33 Raptor engines, which together produce 16.7 million pounds of thrust, about twice the 8.8 million pounds of thrust on NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which first released late last year.
The spacecraft itself, at 165 feet tall, has six Raptor engines: three for use in Earth’s atmosphere and three for operation in the vacuum of space.
The rocket runs on liquid oxygen and liquid methane. The complete system requires more than 10 million pounds of propellant for launch.
The Starship system is designed to be fully reusable and aims to become a new method of flying cargo and people beyond Earth. The rocket is also central to NASA’s plan to return astronauts to the Moon. SpaceX won a multimillion-dollar contract from the agency to use Starship as a manned lunar lander as part of NASA’s Artemis lunar program.
Musk previously said he expected the company to do so spend about $2 billion on Starship development this year.
Objectives for the second flight
There were no people aboard this attempt to reach space with Starship. Company leadership has previously emphasized that SpaceX expects to fly hundreds of Starship missions before the rocket launches with any crew.
SpaceX was looking to beat the first launch’s nearly 4-minute flight time, reach space with Saturday’s attempt and demonstrate that improvements to its ground infrastructure mitigated the damage caused by the debut attempt.
During the April launch, SpaceX fired just 30 of the 33 Raptor engines on the base of the Super Heavy booster. Other engines were lost during the flight. In addition, a communications problem caused an unexpected delay in the activation of the rocket’s autonomous flight termination system, which destroys the vehicle if it flies off course.
SpaceX introduced upgrades to the launch pad infrastructure as well as the design of the rocket itself for the second attempt.
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