2023-04-20 14:58:56
Starting at 3:28 p.m. from Texas
The first full test of the space transportation system designed by Elon Musk’s company was aborted on Monday due to a pressurization problem.
The company SpaceX will try again to launch its space vehicle today Starship, the largest rocket in the world. At 3:28 p.m., Spanish peninsular timethe one-hour window will open for the Elon Musk company team to fully test the entire Starship system for the first time, made up of the Super Heavy rocket and the ship, also called Starship.
To be SpaceX’s second attempt to put this transport system into orbit for the first time designed to explore Earth’s orbit, the Moon, and in the future, Mars. Last Monday, the first test was suspended minutes before launch when a pressurization problem was detected in a rocket stage. Although the failure was discovered a few minutes before the scheduled launch time, the engineers continued with the countdown until there were a few seconds left to test other phases prior to takeoff.
The launch from the SpaceX Space Center in Boca China, in Texas, will be broadcast and can be followed from elmundo.es, on the SpaceX website and on its YouTube channel. The window will open at 3:28 p.m. and close at 4:30 p.m., but it is not yet known when the countdown will begin. If for meteorological reasons or due to some failure it is not possible to launch in that slot, it will be postponed again.
“All systems are currently green for launch,” Elon Musk confirmed this morning on his Twitter account.
The ship Starship It is designed to transport cargo and crew -up to 100 people, according to SpaceX- but the objective of today’s flight will be to test the systems, for which it will orbit the Earth and after an hour and a half from takeoff it will land in the Pacific, at a point close to Hawaii. Approximately a few minutes after takeoff, the first stage of the rocket will separate from the ship and perform the return and re-entry maneuver to Earth, to land in a controlled manner in the Gulf of Mexico.
Elon Musk’s expectations for this test are not very high, however. Before the first test, he indicated that he would consider a success “anything that did not end with the destruction of the launch pad.” Considering the power of the rocket, this is not an exaggeration either.
Super Heavy surpasses, albeit narrowly, the brand new Space Launch System (SLS) with which NASA carries out its Artemis lunar program. In the first test mission, Artemis 1, carried out last November, the rocket destroyed part of the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, disabling the elevators, due to its enormous power.
Elon Musk’s Starship will also be part of NASA’s lunar program, as it has been the vehicle chosen by the space agency for its astronauts to reach the lunar surface on Artemis III, starting in 2025. It will be a modified version of Starship , which will have several configurations depending on the objective of each flight.
Before NASA astronauts go to the Moon, it is scheduled that the millonario japons Yusuku Maezawa and their companions embark on the Starship for a tourist flight of approximately one week that will orbit the Moon. Whether this space adventure becomes a reality depends directly on the success of this test, since the schedule for the first civil mission to lunar orbit is in 2023.
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