{"id":778914,"date":"2024-03-14T11:08:56","date_gmt":"2024-03-14T16:08:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?p=778914"},"modified":"2024-03-14T11:08:56","modified_gmt":"2024-03-14T16:08:56","slug":"starship-reaches-orbit-on-third-test-but-breaks-up-on-re-entry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?p=778914","title":{"rendered":"Starship Reaches Orbit on Third Test but Breaks Up on Re-Entry"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p>After falling short in its first two attempts, SpaceX got its Starship super-rocket to an orbital altitude today during the launch system\u2019s third integrated flight test. Now it just has to work on the landing.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Today\u2019s test marked a major milestone in SpaceX\u2019s effort to develop Starship as the equivalent of a gigantic Swiss Army knife for spaceflight, with potential applications ranging from the deployment of hundreds of Starlink broadband satellites at a time to crewed odysseys to the moon, Mars and beyond.<\/p>\n<p><span id=\"more-166137\"\/><\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\">\n<p>\n<span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Starship\u2019s third launch\" width=\"1110\" height=\"624\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Lp0hen6Bw18?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/span>\n<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<p>The 396-foot-tall (120-meter-tall) rocket lifted off from SpaceX\u2019s Starbase facility in South Texas at 8:25 a.m. CT (1325 GMT), with all 33 of the first-stage booster\u2019s methane-fueled Raptor engines firing. The Super Heavy booster is considered the world\u2019s most powerful launch vehicle, with 16.7 million pounds of thrust at liftoff.<\/p>\n<p>Minutes after liftoff, the rocket\u2019s second stage \u2014 known as Ship \u2014 successfully executed a hot-staging operation to start up its six engines while still attached to the Super Heavy booster. After stage separation, Ship continued onward to an altitude of about 140 miles (230 kilometers). Meanwhile, the booster began a series of burns that were meant to bring it down to a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.<\/p>\n<p>The Super Heavy splashdown didn\u2019t turn out to be as soft as SpaceX hoped. Only a few of the booster\u2019s engines were able to light up again for the intended landing burn. The last telemetry from the booster seemed to suggest that it hit the water at almost 700 mph (1,112 kilometers per hour).<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe didn\u2019t light all the engines that we expected, and we did lose the booster,\u201d SpaceX commentator Dan Huot said during today\u2019s webcast. \u201cWe\u2019ll have to go through the data to figure out exactly what happened, obviously. \u2026 But wow, Ship in space!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>For more than 40 minutes, a camera on the second stage transmitted stunning views of Earth as seen from an orbital height. SpaceX was also able to test the opening and closing of a payload door that\u2019s meant to be used for satellite deployment in orbit.<\/p>\n<p>The flight plan for this test didn\u2019t call for doing a complete orbit. Rather, the trajectory was designed to have Ship come down for its own soft splashdown in a remote stretch of the Indian Ocean.<\/p>\n<p>The climax of the descent came when Ship\u2019s onboard camera captured the glow of plasma generated by the craft\u2019s descent at speeds in excess of 16,500 mph (26,700 kilometers per hour). The atmospheric heating was expected to reach 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit (1,425 degrees Celsius).<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019ve never seen anything like this before,\u201d SpaceX commentator Kate Tice said of the fiery real-time video, which was transmitted down to Earth via SpaceX\u2019s Starlink network.<\/p>\n<p>SpaceX founder Elon Musk marveled at the sight in a posting to X \/ Twitter, the social media channel he owns:<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter\"\/>\n<p>A few minutes into the descent, SpaceX lost the signal from Ship \u2014 and the prolonged silence led SpaceX\u2019s mission controllers to assume that the ship was lost during re-entry. It\u2019s possible that the second stage\u2019s engines weren\u2019t able to relight properly to reduce the speed of the descent. The mission team will have to analyze the data to determine what went wrong.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNo splashdown today,\u201d Huot said. \u201cBut it\u2019s incredible to see how much further we got this time around.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Huot emphasized that the aim of today\u2019s test was to learn how to improve future Starships, and eventually make them reusable. \u201cThe data is the payload on one of these flights,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>SpaceX is already getting ready for the next test flight, and the ones after that. \u201cHopefully, at least 6 more flights this year,\u201d Musk said before today\u2019s launch in an <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/elonmusk\/status\/1767644766051668053\">X \/ Twitter posting<\/a>. The precise timing will depend on approvals from the Federal Aviation Administration.<\/p>\n<p>NASA is depending on SpaceX to provide a version of Starship that would serve as the landing system for the Artemis program\u2019s first crewed mission to the lunar surface, currently set for 2026. And Musk has even more ambitious destinations in mind \u2014 including flights that he hopes will carry thousands of settlers to Mars.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cStarship will make life multiplanetary,\u201d <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/elonmusk\/status\/1768287613570396165\">he wrote after today\u2019s test<\/a>.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\">\n<p>\n<span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Starship\u2019s failed re-entry\" width=\"1110\" height=\"624\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/d6EbicxQxzA?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/span>\n<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<div class=\"sharedaddy sd-block sd-like jetpack-likes-widget-wrapper jetpack-likes-widget-unloaded\" id=\"like-post-wrapper-24000880-166137-65f31dfe13c44\" data-src=\"https:\/\/widgets.wp.com\/likes\/?ver=13.2#blog_id=24000880&amp;post_id=166137&amp;origin=www.universetoday.com&amp;obj_id=24000880-166137-65f31dfe13c44&amp;n=1\" data-name=\"like-post-frame-24000880-166137-65f31dfe13c44\" data-title=\"Like or Reblog\">\n<h3 class=\"sd-title\">Like this:<\/h3>\n<p><span class=\"button\"><span>Like<\/span><\/span> <span class=\"loading\">Loading&#8230;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"sd-text-color\"\/><a rel=\"nofollow\" class=\"sd-link-color\"\/><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><br \/>\n<br \/><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.universetoday.com\/166137\/starship-orbit-spacex-third-test-breaks-up\/?rand=772204\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After falling short in its first two attempts, SpaceX got its Starship super-rocket to an orbital altitude today during the launch system\u2019s third integrated flight test. Now it just has&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":778915,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-778914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-genaero"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=778914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778914\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/778915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=778914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=778914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=778914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}