2023-04-20 01:26:58
Second attempt for the inaugural flight into space of Starship, the largest rocket ever built with which Elon Musk wants to take the next batch of humans to the Moon, the first crew to Mars and, later, beyond, according to his intentions. But first, his company, SpaceX, must demonstrate that this 120-meter ‘monster’, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, is capable of taking off for the first time with its two stages assembled (which carry, between them, a whopping 39 engines) is capable of taking flight to complete almost one return to Earth.
Takeoff -which you can see live above- from the company’s facilities in Boca Chica (Texas, USA) is scheduled to start at 3:28 p.m. (Spanish time). From that moment on, the company has a 62-minute launch window in which the imposing Starship with its two integrated stages (on the one hand, the base called Super Heavy, 70 meters high and made up of 33 Raptor engines; on the other, the 50-meter Starship, with three main Raptors plus three secondary ones) will set course for space. That is if there are no setbacks like the first attempt, when a frozen valve caused the launch to be cancelled.
If all goes according to plan, eight minutes after takeoff, 32 kilometers from the coast in the Gulf of Mexico, in the Atlantic Ocean, the second stage will sink in a soft landing, simulating how it would end up on the platform – but without it. below-. Meanwhile, the Starship’s six upper stage Raptor engines will ignite after 177 seconds, or just under three minutes of flight, continuing the ship’s eastward journey. Those engines will run for about 6.5 minutes and shut down after 560 seconds of flight.
The spacecraft will not complete a full orbit turn, but will instead be placed on an unstable trajectory around our planet, circling low-Earth orbit at 18,000 miles per hour. Later, gravity will take effect and ‘catch’ the ship, which will cross the atmosphere enduring temperatures of more than 1,600 degrees, to finally end up some 100 kilometers from the coast of Hawaii, in the Pacific Ocean, in an uncontrolled landing. (although it is planned that in subsequent flights this first stage will also execute a soft landing).
Schematic description of the route in the first test of the Starship in space
To date, the Starship prototypes that have managed to rise have been of the second stage (the ship with six engines). Up to five times it has been possible to take the space vehicle up to 10 kilometers high, although only once, in the last test, has it successfully landed.
For its part, Super Heavy, made up of thirty-three engines, has never taken off, so this will be its baptism of fire. In February, SpaceX did a booster firing test, firing 31 of its 33 Raptor engines for about 10 seconds with the rocket bolted upright on a pad.
Probabilities that everything will not go well
Of the twenty prototypes created, half have ended up exploding or burning. Perhaps for this reason, Musk himself was not too optimistic last Sunday, when he stated on Twitter that “we should not expect success” from this test, to which he added that, however, the flight “would not be boring.”
From the same company they stated that “success is measured by how much we can learn, which will inform and improve the probability of success in the future as SpaceX rapidly advances in the development of Starship.” A message that Musk’s company has been repeating since 2019, when the first tests began and, with them, the first explosions.
In fact, in view of this same test, SpaceX issued a statement ensuring that the objective is to “try to collect as much data as possible during the flight to quantify the input dynamics and better understand what the vehicle experiences in a flight regime. which is extremely difficult to accurately predict or replicate computationally.” Certainly, the show seems to be served.
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