Starship, a futuristic spacecraft designed by SpaceX to send astronauts to the Moon and beyond, which left this Thursday towards the sky of Texas (United States) in its third test carried out by Elon Musk’s company, disintegrated in the return to Earth. It almost completed the entire flight – going further than the previous two tests, which ended in explosions – but SpaceX confirmed that Starship was destroyed during re-entry into the atmosphere.
The two-story vehicle, taller than the Statue of Liberty, had taken off from SpaceX’s space base near Boca Chica, on the Texas coast, on an unmanned low-orbit space flight. After almost three minutes of flight, at an altitude of 72 kilometers, he performed a key separation maneuver.
This test flight, which lasted much longer than the previous ones, was the third for the Starship spacecraft mounted on top of the Super Heavy rocket. Both Starship and Super Heavy were designed and built by SpaceX, the rocket and satellite company created in 2002 by multimillionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk.
Starship remained in space for 15 minutes after take-off and re-entry into the atmosphere was scheduled approximately 50 minutes after the start of the mission, with the ship being destroyed in this last phase.
During transmission online from SpaceX, the company’s own commentators who followed the launch said that mission control lost communications with the ship during re-entry into the atmosphere. Contact with Starship was lost moments after a video camera mounted on the vehicle, which broadcast the flight live, showed a red glow surrounding the silver ship produced by the frictional heat of re-entry into the atmosphere.
The vehicle was close to making its planned dive into the Indian Ocean almost an hour after launch. A few minutes later, SpaceX confirmed that it had “lost” the ship, which meant, at the time, that it had burned down or had broken apart due to the stress re-entry into the atmosphere. However, it was clarified that it disintegrated.
Departure of the Starship mounted on top of the Super Heavy rocket Joe Skipper/Reuters
SpaceX’s live broadcast of the liftoff had earlier shown a rocket rising from the launch pad into the sky, as the powerful Raptor engine cluster roared in a ball of fire and clouds of steam vapor grew around it. water and gases.
For reasons that are not yet clear, SpaceX chose to skip one of the main objectives of this flight: an attempt to restart one of the Raptor engines in space, in low orbit. This is considered a crucial milestone for Starship’s future success.
Even though it failed in the final leg of the mission, the fact that it almost completed the expected one-hour flight path is a new milestone in the development of a spacecraft crucial to Elon Musk’s satellite launch plans and NASA’s lunar program. . NASA Administrator Bill Nelson congratulated SpaceX on what he considered “a successful flight test”, in a statement on the social network X.
During the flight, Starship reached a maximum altitude of 234 kilometers, according to SpaceX. The company’s engineers hoped to have improved on Starship’s two previous performances, which ended in explosions just minutes after liftoff. The company had already made it known before the flight that there was a high probability that this new flight would also end in the destruction of the ship before its end.
All indicators still point to Starship remaining a considerable distance away from being fully operational. Elon Musk has said that the rocket has to fly hundreds of times without a crew before transporting humans. Many other ambitious milestones will still have to be met before the spacecraft can take NASA astronauts to the surface of the Moon.
Elon Musk is counting on Starship to fulfill his goal of building the next generation of larger, multipurpose spacecraft capable of sending people and cargo to the Moon at the end of this decade and, ultimately, flying to Mars.
Closer to Earth, Elon Musk also sees Starship as the ship that will eventually replace the Falcon 9 rocket as the workhorse in the company’s commercial launches, which already launches, worldwide, most of the satellites and other payloads for low Earth orbit.