After several disappointing failures, SpaceX’s Starship – the mammoth rocket that Elon Musk hopes to use to take people to Mars – made it to space and back down to Earth during a 10th test flight on Tuesday night.
The largely successful mission was likely a relief to both SpaceX and Nasa, suggesting that the development programmes is back on track.
Nasa is counting on Starship as the lander to put its astronauts on the moon in the coming years.
“The stakes are the highest they’ve ever been for a Starship launch,” Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank, said before the launch.
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For now, the flight could silence some critics of Mr Musk and SpaceX who suggested that the Starship project was suffering from serious engineering flaws.
Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. Even more ambitiously, Mr Musk says it will be fully reusable, with both stages returning to the launch site and caught by giant mechanical arms.
If SpaceX can pull off this vision, Starship could revolutionise the space industry, enabling the launching of bigger and heavier payloads at much lower costs.
The 120m vehicle consists of an upper-stage spacecraft, the Starship, and a powerful booster stage, with 33 engines, known as the Super Heavy.
SpaceX has a “break it and fix it” philosophy of development, unlike the traditional approach of Nasa and older aerospace companies that attempt to anticipate all of the engineering problems before a test flight. That leads to more failures, but SpaceX has shown it can be faster and more efficient.
But the seventh, eight and ninth test flights were disappointing, because the upper-stage Starship failed at an earlier part of the flight than on the fifth and sixth test flights, which survived re-entry and simulated a landing over the Indian Ocean.
On the 10th flight, the booster successfully simulated a soft landing over the Gulf of Mexico, and the upper stage made it all the way to the Indian Ocean. While in space, the upper stage deployed eight dummy prototypes of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink internet satellites, successfully testing a Pez dispenser-like apparatus to push each one into space.
Video coverage of the re-entry indicated that the spacecraft’s heat shield was more effective at keeping Starship’s structure intact as it belly-flopped through the atmosphere. However, the rear flaps used for controlling the vehicle were partially burned through. A part of the aft portion of the spacecraft also appeared to explode early in the re-entry process.
The mission ended with the spacecraft flipping to a vertical orientation and simulating a landing. It then toppled over into the waters of the Indian Ocean, and exploded, an expected outcome.
The success of the test does not mean that SpaceX is on track for some of its boldest recent predictions about getting to Mars.
In September, Mr Musk said the first Starships would launch toward Mars in 2026 without any people aboard, and the first crewed flight could take place as soon as 2028.
In May, he was less sanguine. “We’ll try to make that opportunity, if we get lucky,” he said during a company presentation. “I think we’ll probably have a 50/50 chance right now.”
Mr Musk on Monday night said he hoped that Starship would demonstrate next year the ability to refuel the rocket in orbit, a necessity for sending the vehicle beyond Earth’s orbit.
Then there is SpaceX’s contract to get Nasa to the moon.
Artemis III, the mission that is to land two Nasa astronauts in the south polar region of the moon, is scheduled for late 2027. A version of Starship is to be used as the lander, to take the astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon.
With the delays in Starship’s development, Artemis III will almost certainly not launch until 2028 or later. SpaceX still has to demonstrate key capabilities, including the launching of multiple Starships in quick succession and the transfer of propellants between Starships.
All of these timelines are shifting as China makes steady progress on its programme to land astronauts on the moon before 2030. It announced this month that it had successfully tested a lunar lander. – The New York Times.
