The prototype Starship SN10 returns for a soft lay on a concrete pad at the company’s facility in Boca Chica, Texas.
SpaceX
SpaceX’s StarsX prototype exploded shortly after landing for the first time after a high-altitude flight test on Wednesday.
The cause of the explosion, or whether it was deliberate, was not immediately clear. Elon Musk on the other hand refers to explosions as “RUDs,” or Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly.
The rocket company’s test confirmed Starship No. 10, or SN10. SpaceX aimed to launch the prototype as high as 10 kilometers, or about 32,800 feet high. There were no passengers on board the rocket, as it is a development vehicle and flies independently.
The SN10 flight was similar to those made by SpaceX in December and February, when it tested SN8 and SN9 flight prototypes, respectively. The two previous rockets completed a number of development goals – including aerodynamics testing, successive shutdown of the engines, and moving to the outside for landing – but both prototypes exploded. on impact while trying to land, unable to slow down enough.
Like SN8 and SN9, the goal of flight SN10 was not to reach maximum altitude, but to test several key components of the Starship system. SpaceX fired all three engines for construction and then shut down one at a time in sequence as the rocket approached the top of the intended aircraft’s altitude.
SN10 then moved propellant from the main tanks to the head tanks, before moving itself for “belly flop” reentry movement – which allows it to descend under control through the air with the four flaps of the rocket. Then, in the final moments of descent, SpaceX repelled the rocket and returned to the vertical, firing the Raptor’s engines to make it slower for landing.
“The third time, as the saying goes, is the charm – we’ve had a successful soft walk on the landing block,” SpaceX integration chief engineer John Insprucker told broadcast- company web
Starship SN10 lights up all three engines and flippers before landing.
SpaceX
The Starship prototype is about 150 feet high, or about the size of a 15-story building, and is powered by three Raptor rocket engines The rocket is constructed of stainless steel, representing the early versions of the rocket published in 2019.
“The Texas team has several other suborbital test vehicles in construction, with number 11 ready to roll out to the pad in the future,” Insprucker said.
The Musk company is developing Starship with the goal of launching goods and people on missions to the moon and to Mars.
Starship is one of two “Manhattan Projects” that SpaceX is developing at the same time, and the other is its Starlink satellite internet program. Musk has previously estimated that it will cost about $ 5 billion to fully develop Starship, though SpaceX has not said how much it has spent on the program so far.
The company last month raised $ 850 million in its latest capital investment at a value of $ 74 billion.
Musk remains “very confident” that Starship will be “safe enough for human transport by 2023” – an ambitious goal as the company began diligently developing and testing the rockets in early 2019.
But Musk’s timeline is very important, as Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has paid for a Starship flight around the moon by 2023. Maezawa announced Tuesday that he is inviting eight members of the public to come into his dearMoon mission, which will be a six-day journey. to the moon and back.
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