Houston (AFP) – Elon Musk’s SpaceX was poised Friday to carry out its latest test of the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket, the Starship, with plans for the first-ever “catch” of both the booster and the spaceship. Successful recoveries of the two Starship components would mark a significant milestone in the space industry’s decades-long pursuit of fully reusable rocket systems that can drastically reduce mission costs and make frequent launches possible.
“If successful, this will mark the first full recovery of an orbital launch system and a breakthrough moment in making Starship a reliable, rapidly reusable rocket,” SpaceX said. The company has caught the booster, dubbed Super Heavy, on three previous occasions, with the first stage descending vertically back to the launch site shortly after blastoff and nestling into mechanical “chopstick” arms.
For the 15th Starship test flight Friday, SpaceX aims to carry out its first attempt to capture the Starship spacecraft that gives the rocket system its name. It would be a groundbreaking moment in the development of the vessel, some versions of which are designed to launch internet satellites and data centers into orbit. Other iterations will be made to ferry people to the Moon and Mars. A spacecraft that can be fully reused is the “Holy Grail” of the space industry, said Clayton Swope, an aerospace expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “No one’s really been able to do that so far,” he said. “People have been trying to do that since the (NASA) space shuttle. But the space shuttle ended up being kind of a compromise because a lot of the vehicle wasn’t reusable.”
Recovering an upper stage involves an extraordinary amount of precision, said Kathleen Curlee, a senior analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. “Getting Starship off the ground is an engineering achievement in and of itself, catching the upper stage involves millions of moving parts that all have to go right for a successful capture,” she said. The spaceship will be falling much faster and from a much higher altitude than the booster, with the vessel forced to withstand the extreme heat of reentering Earth’s atmosphere. As of Friday morning, however, it was unclear if the launch would take place as planned as the US Federal Aviation Administration had not yet given its final approval.
Musk, the world’s richest person, has already revolutionized the space sector with the partially reusable Falcon rockets, which are regularly employed to launch satellites and carry astronauts to the International Space Station. But the Starship project has been plagued by years-long delays as SpaceX grapples with novel engineering challenges — even as NASA is counting on the spaceship to serve as a lunar lander for its Artemis program. Other technical challenges include transferring fuel to Starship in orbit — a requirement for any journey to the Moon or Mars. Following SpaceX’s high-profile stock market debut in June that raised about $85.7 billion, the company carried out the first orbital flight of Starship in September, though the mission was cut short due to an engine issue.
Friday’s launch of the massive 124-meter (407-foot) rocket is scheduled to take place at SpaceX’s “Starbase” in southern Texas at 4:45 pm (2245 GMT). Weather conditions were favorable, with sunny skies and light winds. Following liftoff and the mid-air separation of the two stages, SpaceX plans to bring Super Heavy back to Earth six and a half minutes later, catching it at the launch site on the Gulf of Mexico coastline. The spaceship will continue to reach Earth’s orbit, where it will deploy 26 satellites into Musk’s Starlink satellite internet constellation that has become a major revenue stream for SpaceX.
It will then circle the planet 14 times, before returning 22 hours later and — SpaceX hopes — descending safely into the chopstick arms. SpaceX has said it would proceed with these maneuvers only if conditions are optimal, and in the past has made last-minute changes to test flights under Musk’s “fail fast” strategy of learning through crashes, explosions, and other mishaps.
© 2024 AFP
