New In: Latest Starship report
After two days and this being its second attempt, the infamous Starship took off for the first time today, with the idea of reaching orbit.
After only four minutes of flight, it reached a height of 39 km. But sadly, the ordeal didn’t end too well.
After a total of two years, we finally welcomed a new Starship flight. But this time not on its own drive but on the drive of the Super Heavy carrier. It is far more powerful than NASA’s Artemis Special Launch System and the one planned to take humans to the Moon.
The launch was spectacular. The huge and also largest rocket so far left the launch pad slowly but powerfully, without destroying it. Everything went according to plan, although careful observers noticed that 5 of the carrier’s 33 Raptor engines were not working or had shut down prematurely.
Viewers worldwide watched as supersonic speed and a height of 39 km were reached, but when the Raptor engines of the carrier stopped working, the separation of the Starship from the carrier did not occur.
The rocket rotated and tumbled strangely and then exploded. Some reports say that the carrier successfully separated and began to return to Earth in a belly-flip maneuver. That’s unlikely because it begs the question of where the Starship ended up.
The SpaceX company considers this a success, which we can agree on because we have seen the explosion of the Starship on the ramp itself before. The company sent a message that there was a quick unplanned disassembly.
As Elon Musk said the other day: “Success maybe, excitement guaranteed.”
As before, the data will be collected, and it will be determined what caused the deviation from the planned flight. The starship complete with the carrier is a reusable rocket.
We remind you that SpaceX received a $2.9 billion contract to build a variant of the Starship to send NASA astronauts to the moon as part of the Artemis program.
The first test launch took place on May 5, 2021 from SpaceX’s launch site in the small town of Boca Chica in South Texas. The entire flight from launch to landing took just over six minutes.
SpaceX’s Starship SN15 has successfully landed after a test flight to an altitude of 10 km, successfully performing a belly roll maneuver and a light touch down landing maneuver. At that time we didn’t see an explosion, the rocket remained intact, achieving the first one hundred percent success of the test flight.
In any case, it takes many more successful landings, without explosions, reaching orbit, for people to get into this concept of a spaceship.
