\n<\/p>\n
Third time was the charm on Tuesday for the launch of SpaceX\u2019s Starship megarocket after the launch had been scrubbed two times in as many days. The success of this 10th flight proved the spacecraft had overcome its past failures key to the Mars rocket\u2019s reusable design.<\/p>\n
The stainless steel behemoth, 403ft (123 meters) tall, lifted off from the company\u2019s Starbase in southern Texas at 6.30pm local time (2330 GMT), to loud cheers from engineering teams, a webcast showed. This mission was to be a test of the ship\u2019s new heat shield tiles and satellite deployment abilities, among hundreds of other upgrades from past iterations.<\/p>\n
The rocket\u2019s upper half separated as planned from its Super Heavy booster, the 232-ft-tall first stage that normally returns to land in its launch tower\u2019s giant catch-arms, but on Tuesday targeted the Gulf of Mexico waters to demonstrate an alternate landing engine configuration.<\/p>\n
Shortly after reaching space, Starship\u2019s \u201cPez\u201d-like satellite deployment system dispensed mock Starlink satellites for the first time, a milestone SpaceX either cancelled or failed to reach during past tests.<\/p>\n
Starship made a successful splashdown in the Indian Ocean after enduring intense heat through its atmospheric reentry \u2013 a crucial phase of the test that has shredded the rocket on past flights.<\/p>\n
The 10th test flight comes after a string of explosive failures that raised doubts about whether the world\u2019s most powerful launch vehicle can fulfill founder Elon Musk\u2019s vision of colonizing Mars or helping Nasa return astronauts to the moon.<\/p>\n
SpaceX will not attempt to catch the booster from Tuesday\u2019s flight because the component would instead be used for in-flight experiments \u201cto gather real-world performance data on future flight profiles and off-nominal scenarios\u201d.<\/p>\n
Monday\u2019s launch scrub was blamed on weather as thick clouds, hanging overhead for much of the day, forced a delay with a mere 40 seconds left on the countdown clock. A Sunday attempt was scrubbed due to a liquid oxygen leak at the Starship launchpad, billionaire Musk wrote on X overnight.<\/p>\n
Much is riding on the mission, after the last three flights ended with the upper stage exploding: twice over the Caribbean and once after reaching space. In June, an upper stage blew up during a ground test.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve had so many tests and it hasn\u2019t proven itself reliable,\u201d Dallas Kasaboski, a space analyst for consulting firm Analysys Mason, told AFP. \u201cThe successes have not exceeded the failures.\u201d<\/p>\n
The goal is to send the upper stage ship \u2013 eventually intended to carry crew and cargo \u2013 halfway across the globe before splashing down off north-western Australia.<\/p>\n
Outfitted with prototype heat-shield materials, it will deploy dummy Starlink satellites while flying a trajectory meant to stress-test its rear flaps.<\/p>\n
The booster, known as Super Heavy, will splash down in the Gulf of Mexico. While SpaceX previously wowed observers by catching the booster in the launch tower\u2019s \u201cchopstick arms\u201d, this flight will instead focus on data collection under less-than-ideal flight profiles.<\/p>\n
This year, two Starship tests have failed early in flight, with another failure in space on its ninth flight, and a \u201ccatastrophic explosion\u201d of test stand in June that destroyed a Starship and sent debris flying into nearby Mexican territory have tested SpaceX\u2019s capital-intensive test-to-failure development approach, in which new iterations of rocket prototypes are flown to their technical limits.<\/p>\n
That ethos is markedly different from SpaceX\u2019s rivals such as Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, whose New Glenn rocket made an operational debut in January following years of on-the-ground development and testing. The new Vulcan rocket from United Launch Alliance, co-owned by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, had a similar upbringing before its 2024 debut.<\/p>\n
Despite recent setbacks, Starship is not seen as being at a crisis point. SpaceX\u2019s \u201cfail fast, learn fast\u201d philosophy has already given it a commanding lead in launches with its Falcon rockets, while Dragon capsules ferry astronauts to the International Space Station and Starlink has become a geopolitical asset.<\/p>\n
Still, Starship presents new challenges. Musk has identified developing a fully reusable orbital heat shield as the toughest task, noting it took nine months to refurnish the space shuttle\u2019s heat shield between flights.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we\u2019re trying to achieve here with Starship is to have a heat shield that can be flown immediately,\u201d he said on a webcast Monday.<\/p>\n
SpaceX\u2019s Starlink satellite internet business, a major source of company revenue, is also tied to Starship\u2019s success. Musk aims to use Starship to launch larger batches of Starlink satellites, which have so far been deployed by SpaceX\u2019s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket into space.<\/p>\n
Musk, for his part, remained bullish. \u201cIn about 6 or 7 years, there will be days where Starship launches more than 24 times in 24 hours,\u201d the entrepreneur said on Sunday, replying to a user on X.<\/p>\n
Another hurdle is proving Starship can be refueled in orbit with super-cooled propellant \u2013 an essential but untested step for the vehicle to carry out deep-space missions.<\/p>\n
Time is running short to ready a modified version for Nasa\u2019s lunar lander for 2027, and for Musk to make good on his vow to send an uncrewed Starship to Mars next year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Third time was the charm on Tuesday for the launch of SpaceX\u2019s Starship megarocket after the launch had been scrubbed two times in as many days. The success of this 10th flight proved the spacecraft had overcome its past failures key to the Mars rocket\u2019s reusable design. The stainless steel behemoth, 403ft (123 meters) tall,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18022,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[5432,7099,1372,4245,150,367,10954,93,10359],"class_list":{"0":"post-18021","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-finally","9":"tag-fly","10":"tag-launches","11":"tag-meant","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-rocket","14":"tag-setbacks","15":"tag-spacexs","16":"tag-starships"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18021\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}