The SpaceX spacecraft, Megarocket, broke into the sky on Tuesday on its tenth test flight, transforming a strong performance after a series of fiery failures began to question its future.
Posting 403 feet (123 meters), Starship is the most powerful launch vehicle ever built and key to the founder Elon Musk vision to transport humanity to Mars, as well as NASA plans to return astronauts to the Moon.
The colossus in stainless steel has taken off from the company’s starbase in southern Texas at 6.30pm (2330 GMT), welcomed by noisy cheers of engineering teams, as seen in live Wéondiction.
A few minutes after the launch, the first step booster known as super heavy, splashed in the Gulf of Mexico, triggering a sound boom on its way. Unlike other recent tests, SpaceX has chosen not to try to capture with the giant “Chop Stick” arms of the launch tower, rather testing how it would behave if an engine flows.
The attention then moved to the upper stage – also individually known under the name of starship and intended to one day carry the crew and the freight – to demonstrate its capacities by going into space.
For the first time, SpaceX managed to successfully deploy eight Internet Muects Starlink satellites, with on -board cameras radiating live views of a robotic mechanism each pushing one by one.
It was not entirely smoothly navigation. Some heat tiles have fallen and a small section of a burnt flap during the fiery descent of the ship, because it was wrapped in pink and purple plasma.
But SpaceX’s communications director Dan Huot said that a large part of this was expected because the vehicle was intentionally transported by plane on a punishing trajectory with some deleted tiles.
“We are a little mean to this stars a little,” he said during the webdiffusion. “We really try to put him to the test and to point out what some of his weak points are.”
“Excellent work of the SpaceX team !!” Musk wrote on X.
“Critical mission”
Many rose on the mission, after the last three flights ended with the explosion of the upper stadium: twice on the Caribbean and once after reaching space. In June, a higher stadium exploded during a ground test.
Despite the recent setbacks, Starship was not considered to be a crisis point. The philosophy “to fail quickly, to learn quickly” from SpaceX has already given him a dominant advance in launches with his Falcon rockets, while the dragons capsules the astronauts at ISS and Starlink have become a geopolitical asset.
However, even with a tenth successful flight, major challenges are looming. Musk identified the development of a fully reusable orbital thermal shield as the most difficult task, noting that it took nine months to redo the thermal shield of the space shuttle between flights.
“What we are trying to achieve here with Starship is to have a thermal shield that can be controlled immediately,” he said during a webdiffusion on Monday.
Another obstacle proves that Starship can be supplied with orbit with a super cooled propeller – an essential but not tested step so that the vehicle performs missions in depth space.
The weather is short to prepare a modified version as Lunar Lander of NASA for 2027, and for Musk to behave on his wish to send an unrelated to Mars next year.
