Coming off a string of explosive failures, on Tuesday night SpaceX once again launched its gigantic Starship rocket into space, with both its stages successfully returning to their separate landing targets on Earth.
This time, the only huge explosions were planned one: final blasts as the two spacecraft touched down. After the launch had been scrubbed twice over the two prior days, the company's engineers could finally breathe a sigh of relief.
The flight demonstrated several key objectives, including completing a suborbital flight — something the previous three tests of the world's largest rocket couldn't achieve — and deploying a payload in space. Impressively, Starship even persevered despite being deliberately stripped of some of its experimental heat shield tiles to stress-test some of its weak points during reentry.
The success of this 10th flight will be enough, for the time being, to quiet some of SpaceX's critics. But with development still way behind schedule, the company is under enormous pressure to quickly deliver a finished product, since NASA planning to use Starship to bring astronauts to the surface of the Moon sometime in 2027. Needlessly inviting additional scrutiny and setting even more unrealistic expectations, CEO Elon Musk has bragged that the flagship rocket will complete an uncrewed flight to Mars by 2026, which is now just months away.
And not everything with the flight went flawlessly. After launching from the company's Starbase facility in south Texas, the rocket's upper stage, the Starship proper, continued into space, where it demonstrated a new Pez-like mechanism for deploying the next generation of Starlink satellites by releasing eight dummy satellites into orbit. It also showed it could relight one of its six engines in space, an essential step towards making the vehicle reusable.
But as the spacecraft re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, facing temperatures around 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit, part of its aft appeared to explode, the New York Times reported. Per Spaceflight Now, it seems that the craft's protective skirt blew apart, and one of its rear flaps partially melted. There's a silver lining, however:even in the face of that damage, the remaining portion of the craft performed as intended for the rest of the trip.
"They'll have to do some work there," Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the think tank the American Enterprise Institute, told the NYT. "But even with that, it maintained perfect control and was able to do the splashdown as intended."
Meanwhile, Starship's titanic Super Heavy booster flew itself to the Gulf of Mexico, where it performed a soft but fiery landing. In previous tests, the booster guided itself back to its launch tower to be caught midair by a pair of "chopstick" arms. This time, the company's engineers wanted to simulate an emergency landing scenario by deliberately shutting down one of its 33 engines. It passed the test, making a controlled landing in the water. Moments later, it toppled over and also exploded in another fireball. This, SpaceX says, was also anticipated.
The rocket still faces a mountain of technical hurdles. Beyond demonstrating that it's safe enough not to suddenly explode — as it has done on its numerous previous flight tests — SpaceX needs to show that it can be refueled in orbit by another Starship. If it can't, it would be disastrous: without an orbital pitstop, the spacecraft won't have enough propellant to reach the Moon and other destinations in the solar system, like a certain Red Planet that Musk has an obsession for colonizing.
It's also facing an uphill battle with perfecting the spacecraft's heat shield. SpaceX is still experimenting with different tile configurations and will need many more flights before it can be fine-tuned, as Musk himself explained ahead of the flight on Monday. On top of that, the heat shield needs to be able to be reflown immediately if the Starship is going to be reusable. So far, the spacecraft has been shedding far too many tiles during each reentry for that to be the case.
As it stands, it's almost certain that NASA's plan to return astronauts to the Moon using Starship, the Artemis III mission, won't launch in 2027, in the NYT's analysis — which is also the opinion held by some current and former NASA engineers. Harrison, for his part, is optimistic that SpaceX can get back on track. But even he estimated that Starship is at least six months behind schedule, and said that if SpaceX continues to take several months between launches, "it's really going to grind things to a halt in terms of Artemis III."
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