Spaceship launch: SpaceX mega rocket to use dummy satellite, test new design on next flight

CNN
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SpaceX has turned heads and tested boundaries with every test flight of Starship, the most powerful rocket system ever built. And the 400-foot-tall vehicle’s latest mission aims to push the boundaries even further to return astronauts to the moon and one day fulfill CEO Elon Musk’s dream of sending the first humans to Mars.

NASA has agreed to pay SpaceX nearly $3 billion to develop Starship, which will serve as a lunar lander and carry humans to the lunar surface as early as 2027.

The upcoming flight will test an upgrade of the spacecraft aimed at improving the spacecraft’s capabilities – and the ability to survive the trip home from space – as well as conducting an experimental maneuver to test how this “new generation” satellites of the spaceship could be used spacecraft.

The launch was originally scheduled for Wednesday, but SpaceX is now planning for Thursday due to weather, the company said on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that Musk purchased in 2022. Also scheduled to appear on Thursday is Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin’s second attempt to get his New Glenn rocket into the air for its maiden flight. Blue Origin wants to use New Glenn to better compete with SpaceX, which has dominated the global launch market for years.

The launch will now occur no earlier than Thursday at 5:00 p.m. ET (4:00 p.m. local time). from SpaceX’s launch pad at its Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas. The launch window remains open for one hour. The company will stream the event live on its website and X.

The Super Heavy rocket booster, the lowest part of the vehicle, the first stage, provides the first boost after launch. The booster will fire its 33 Raptor engines for about two and a half minutes to propel the attached, unmanned spacecraft vehicle away from the launch pad toward space.

For the first time, one of those 33 Raptor engines will have been in space before: SpaceX said it will reuse an engine recovered from the Super Heavy booster rocket that flew on the company’s fifth test flight in October.

Testing the Raptor engines’ ability to fly multiple missions is critical for SpaceX: The company intends to reuse every part of the Starship system to reduce costs and shorten the time between missions.

The highly anticipated launch marks the seventh flight of the fully integrated Starship system.

Will the Super Heavy booster repeat the landing maneuver in mid-air?

After using most of its fuel, the Super Heavy booster separates from the Starship spacecraft, which ignites its own engines and begins flying through space.

The gigantic launch vehicle steers itself back to the launch site and attempts a soft landing, landing squarely between two massive metal tongs, or “chopsticks,” attached to SpaceX’s launch tower, dubbed “Mechazilla” by CEO Elon Musk.

SpaceX first succeeded in the maneuver in October. However, on the next test flight in November, a Super Heavy touchdown attempt on solid ground was aborted after sensors in the landing zone were damaged during the first takeoff. Engineers found that “critical hardware” failed a health check.

Instead, the Super Heavy booster splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico and was not restored.

During the upcoming test, SpaceX will again have the ability to change paths mid-flight and perform a water jettison of the launch vehicle in the event of safety issues.

However, SpaceX hinted that its hopes were higher, noting in a blog post that “hardware upgrades to the launch and capture tower will increase booster capture reliability.” The upgrades include better protection for sensors on Mechazilla, which failed during the test flight in November, prompting the company to switch to a sea landing.

Meanwhile, the Starship spacecraft, or upper stage of the rocket designed to carry satellites or people, will test a series of upgrades the company has made.

For example, the spacecraft’s propulsion system was modified to increase fuel volume by 25%. The ability to hold more fuel allows the vehicle to start its engines for longer periods of time. Before this test flight, the Starship spacecraft was able to hold about 1,200 tons (2.6 million pounds) of oxidizer and fuel, the company previously said.

In a major first, Starship will also seek to deploy 10 satellite “simulators,” SpaceX said, which will be “similar in size and weight” to the company’s next generation of Starlink internet satellites. The simulators will not remain in space, the company noted. Instead, they will travel on a suborbital trajectory, similar to the Starship spacecraft, which is scheduled to land in the Indian Ocean about an hour after launch.

However, before this particular spacecraft reaches its watery demise, SpaceX will test a few other important targets.

While the Starship vehicle is in space, SpaceX will attempt to re-fire one of its engines – testing how the spacecraft could turn on its propulsion system more than once on future missions that require more than one engine pass. The company tested re-igniting a Starship engine during the test flight in November and deemed the attempt a success.

In this seventh flight test of the integrated rocket system, SpaceX made changes to Starship, including adjustments to the vehicle’s flaps, or the wing-like structures that protrude from the tip of the spacecraft. SpaceX says the flaps for this mission are smaller and moved further toward the top of the vehicle.

According to SpaceX, this optimization is intended to reduce the load on the flaps during reentry, i.e. The maneuver can heat Starship’s exterior to more than 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit (1,427 degrees Celsius), according to previous flight data, and has previously turned Starship’s flaps into “skeletal hands,” as Musk put it, under the jarring physics of reentry.

Since test launches of the Starship system began in April 2023, SpaceX has witnessed the Starship vehicle explode minutes after launch and transition to sophisticated flights that ended with a controlled landing of the vehicle in the ocean. The successful landing of a Super Heavy booster on its launch pad using the “chopstick” catch maneuver in October was also a monumental step forward.

But the spacecraft system still has a long way to go before it can return humans to the lunar surface or take the first humans to Mars.

SpaceX has not yet conducted a mission to orbit or tested how Starship will rendezvous with another vehicle for refueling in space, a maneuver the company needs to perfect to provide the vehicle with enough fuel to get to the moon.

Musk said in 2020 that he hopes SpaceX will launch “hundreds of missions” with satellites before attempting a manned Starship flight.

As Starlink simulators on this latest flight show, the company plans to use Starship to deploy batches of its Internet satellites in the future.

The company also wants to figure out how to land the Starship spacecraft and fly again – instead of losing it to a water spray without recovery.

Similar to the Super Heavy booster, this upper portion of the vehicle is intended to land upright in the arms of the Mechazilla launch tower after flight so that it can be quickly reused.

While broadcasting SpaceX’s test launch in November, SpaceX engineers Jessie Anderson and Kate Tice said the company was completing construction of the 92,903-square-foot “Starfactory” at its Starbase facility in South Texas. The goal of this unit is to produce spacecraft vehicles – “hundreds of ships a year,” Anderson said.

SpaceX expects it will need a large fleet of Super Heavy boosters – and an even larger stable of Starship spacecraft.

That’s because the Starship vehicles “will remain in space for long-duration missions, to go to the moon or Mars or to serve as tankers for refueling,” Anderson said. “But the boosters will come back and turn around to launch the next ship.”

“That (production rhythm) might sound crazy,” Tice noted. “And that’s because it is.”

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