The billionaire space company may attempt a new orbital flight for the Starship, the rocket with which Musk wants to conquer Mars, by the end of June.
Elon Musk didn’t wait long to regain control of the narrative.
Less than 48 hours after the explosion of the spacecraft, the world’s most powerful rocket, the billionaire sets his sights on a second attempt.
The Starship, the reusable rocket Musk has promised to conquer Mars and revisit the moon, exploded during its first orbital flight on April 20.
This explosion was a real shock for the aviation industry and fans of the conquest of space. A giant Starship rocket exploded in the air over Texas just minutes after takeoff. According to SpaceX, this was due to an “unscheduled rapid disassembly” prior to the stage separation. It was the first test flight of this vehicle without passengers developed by SpaceX.
The flight plan was as follows: about three minutes after liftoff, the Super Heavy was to detach and return to the Gulf of Mexico.
Then the Starship rocket turns on its six engines and continues its climb on its own, at an altitude of more than 150 km. After making just under a full orbit around the Earth for about an hour, it will fall back into the Pacific Ocean. But nothing went as planned.
A new orbital flight in one to two months
At 120 meters, the Starship is longer than both NASA’s new massive rocket, the SLS (98 metres), which first lifted off in November, and the legendary Saturn V, the rocket of the Apollo lunar program (111 metres).
The black and silver giant had never flown in its full configuration before, with its super-powerful first stage, called the Super Heavy and equipped with no fewer than 33 engines.
Only the second stage of the craft, the Starship spacecraft that gives its name to the entire rocket, has conducted suborbital tests (at an altitude of about 10 km). It was chosen by NASA to become, in a modified version, the lander for the Artemis 3 mission, which will return astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time in more than half a century, officially in 2025.
As a result, the stakes are enormous. On Starship also falls on the mission set by Musk himself to enable humans to live on Mars in the coming years.
Musk didn’t wait long to come back again. It just announced that SpaceX will attempt a new orbital flight on the Starship in two months at the latest, which means no later than the third week of June.
He made the announcement after a Twitter post from journalist Eric Berger in which he said, “The damage done in Boca Chica at the Starbase launch site looks pretty serious, but a former senior SpaceXer from there says he thinks the pad can be fixed; and (water) – Chiller?) Flame transformer installed in 4 to 6 months. Just passing by as I was told.”
Musk replied.
“Three months ago, we started building a huge water-cooled steel plate for under the launch pad,” the tech mogul said on April 21, just 24 hours after the explosion. “It was not ready in time and we incorrectly thought, based on consistent fire data, that Fondag would succeed on a single launch.”
“It looks like we can be ready to launch again in one to two months,” he added, without giving a specific date.
drives
Aware that this schedule is overambitious, Musk explained, on April 22, that the engines may have caused unexpected damage.
“It is still early in the analysis, but the force of the engines at their throttling may have broken the concrete, rather than simply eroding it,” he said. “The engines were only at half thrust for the steady fire test.”
The billionaire explained that Starship “is the only way for us to become a multi-planetary civilization.”
Experts say the Starship explosion isn’t a total failure for SpaceX. The fact that the missile successfully took off from the launch pad is already quite an achievement. The purpose of the flight, these experts say, was above all to collect as much data as possible to improve the next prototypes and that’s what happened, because the rocket was able to take off.
The orbital launch of the Starship is seen as a leap forward for humanity, as a springboard to reach the Moon, and then Mars, while carrying tons of cargo. Starship is designed to replace the entire current range of SpaceX launchers and separate manned cargo and transport systems. These are the Falcon Heavy and Falcon 9, which are used to launch satellites, resupply the International Space Station, and orbit crews.