On Wednesday, SpaceX launched and successfully landed its futuristic Starship, completing a test flight of the rocketship, that Elon Musk plans to use to land astronauts on the moon and send people to Mars. The previous four test flights led to fiery explosions before, during, or shortly after touchdown near Brownsville on Texas’s southeastern tip.
It was SpaceX’s second landing of Starship. A previous prototype exploded several minutes after landing harder than predicted. Other models of the vehicle had exploded at or shortly after landing. After the rocket landed, flames began to erupt from its foundation. According to Insprucker, the fire was caused by the rocket’s gasoline.
Musk used rocket jargon to tweet about the flight’s success shortly after SpaceX’s official video feed ended. Musk tweeted, “Starship landing nominal.” In other words, the landing went exactly as planned. This newly updated iteration of SpaceX’s full-scale, stainless steel, bullet-shaped rocketship flew more than 6 miles (10 kilometers) over the Gulf of Mexico before flipping and dropping horizontally, then returning vertically just in time for a touchdown. A fire at the rocket’s base was quickly extinguished, and thus the rocket remained standing after the six-minute flight.
Success came on the 60th anniversary of Alan Shepard’s first space flight. And it completed a spectacular two weeks for SpaceX, which had previously launched four more astronauts to the space station for NASA, the nation’s first night time crew splashdown since the Apollo moonshots, and a pair of mini-internet satellite launches.
NASA selected SpaceX’s Starship less than a month ago, to carry astronauts to the lunar surface in the coming years. However, the $3 billion deal was halted last week, after the losing companies Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Dynetics protested the pick. Musk said last month that the NASA funding would assist within the construction of Starship, which can eventually launch atop an excellent Heavy booster. He described the project as “pretty costly” so far, with the majority of the funding coming from within the company. In December, the first high-altitude test was conducted.
SN15 was guided through ascent by three Raptor engines, each shutting down in sequence before the vehicle reaching apogee – approximately 10 km in altitude – almost like previous high-altitude flight tests of Starship. Until reorienting itself for re-entry and controlled aerodynamic descent, SN15 performed a propellant transfer to the internal header tanks, which carry landing propellant.
The Starship prototype descended using active aerodynamic control, which was accomplished by shifting the vehicle’s two forward and two aft flaps independently. All four flaps were operated by an onboard flight computer, enabling the Starship’s attitude to be controlled during flight and a precise landing at the intended location. Since the SN15 performed the landing flip maneuver just before touching down for a conventional landing on the pad, the Raptor engines re-ignited.
These Starship test flights are all about enhancing our understanding and construction of a fully reusable transportation system, designed to hold both crew and cargo on long-duration interplanetary flights, allowing mankind to return to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
