SpaceX’s new Starship re-tries 1st launch on Super Heavy rocket

Elon Musk’s SpaceX aims Thursday to launch the company’s next-generation Starship spacecraft atop a powerful Super Heavy rocket for the first time, in an anticipated but brief unmanned test flight from the Texas Gulf Coast.

Final preparations were underway at the Starbase launch site east of Brownsville, Texas, for liftoff three days after a test launch before being scrapped at the end of the countdown due to a frozen pressure valve.

If there’s no other show on Thursday, the two-stage rocket ship, which is taller than the Statue of Liberty at 120 meters, is due to blast off between 9:30 and 10:30 a.m. ET on its planned 90-minute debut flight. into space, just shy of Earth’s orbit.

Why is it so crowded?

Taking the newly assembled Starship rocket and booster off the ground for the first time will be an important milestone in SpaceX’s ambitions to send humans back to the moon and eventually to Mars – playing a key role in NASA’s newly inaugurated space flight program, Artemis.

A successful flight would instantly rank the Starship system as the most powerful launch vehicle on Earth.

The lower-stage Super Heavy Boosters and upper-stage Starships that will carry them into space are designed as reusable components, able to fly back to Earth for a soft landing — a maneuver that has become routine in dozens of missions to SpaceX’s smaller orbiters. – Falcon 9 class rocket.

But neither stage will recover from Thursday’s launch. However, both parts will end their initial flight into space with a landing in the ocean. The lower stage will fall into the Gulf of Mexico after separating from the upper stage, which will descend in the Pacific Ocean after gaining almost one Earth orbit.

How testing has gone so far

The prototype Starship cruise ship has made five sub-space test flights to an altitude of 10 kilometers in recent years, but the booster rocket has never left the ground.

In February, SpaceX conducted a Super Heavy test, firing 31 of 33 engines in about 10 seconds with the rocket mounted vertically above the platform.

The US Federal Aviation Administration last Friday granted a license for the first test flight of a fully-stacked rocket system, clearing the final regulatory hurdle for the long-awaited launch.

SpaceX’s announcement this week on Twitter that it plans to attempt a second launch on April 20, after the first one was scrapped, excited many of Musk’s fans and critics.

The tweet caused jokes on social media platforms with reference to 4/20 as a date widely associated with cannabis culture, and the notoriety Musk gained in 2018 for smoking marijuana in a live web event.

Musk, who bought Twitter last year for $44 billion, is the founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX. He is also the chief executive of electric car maker Tesla Inc.

Starship flight plan for Thursday

If all goes as planned on Thursday, the Starship will climb its longest flight around Earth before re-entering the atmosphere and plummeting into the Pacific at supersonic speeds, about 97 kilometers off the coast of northern Hawaii. island.

After separating from the Starship, the Super Heavy booster is expected to perform the start of a controlled return flight before plunging into the Gulf.

As designed, the Starship rocket is nearly twice as powerful as NASA’s own Space Launch System (SLS), which made the first unmanned flight into orbit in November, sending a NASA spacecraft called Orion on a 10-day trip around the moon and back.