Get ready to witness the third test flight of SpaceX’s Super Heavy Starship rocket as it takes to the skies today
During its third test flight on Thursday morning, SpaceX‘s massive Super Heavy-Starship rocket—the most powerful ever constructed—blasted off. The objective of the test was to send the unmanned upper stage into orbit and then re-enter and splash down in the Indian Ocean under controlled conditions.
The enormous rocket’s 33 Raptor engines, which consume 40,000 pounds of liquid oxygen and methane propellants every second, roared to life at 9:25 a.m. EDT with an audible boom and rapidly ramped up to liftoff thrust.
Shortly after, the 394-foot rocket started its ascent into the sky, slicing through clouds of steam and dust created by the booster’s blazing exhaust while water was poured upward from the pad’s base to dampen the impact of engine ignition.
The Super Heavy-Starship gracefully descended over the Gulf of Mexico, consuming propellants and losing weight as it accelerated. The spectacular display as seen from the launch site and South Padre Island, a few miles north, astounded thousands of people, including tourists and a large group of journalists.
The rocket’s 33 Raptors seemed to be firing normally, allowing it to accelerate past the zone of greatest aerodynamic stress and out of the dense lower atmosphere, surpassing the speed of sound.
In accordance with the predetermined plan, the Raptors started shutting down two minutes and forty-two seconds after liftoff. A few seconds later, the six engines of the Starship upper stage were ignited with the booster still connected, a tweak called “hot staging.” The Super Heavy and Starship stages neatly separated a short while afterward.
The rocket then reversed course and started a controlled descent toward land, with the goal of splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico. Space remained the destination of the starship.
Eight and a half minutes after liftoff, the flight plan specified that the starship’s raptors should be turned off. One hour later, the plane was projected to re-enter the atmosphere and splash down in the Indian Ocean.
Disruptions during earlier flight practices
Super Heavy engine shutdowns and a stage separation malfunction ended the first test flight last April, and the second test flight in November, just before the Starship was supposed to start its planned loop around the planet for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean north of Hawaii, ended in spectacular self-destruct conflagrations.
In the aftermath of the failures, engineers at SpaceX made several modifications to various systems. These included strengthening the rocket’s self-destruct mechanism, improving engine performance, and protecting the pad with a high-power water deluge system that can also dampen the sound of engine ignition.
The business also used a “hot staging” method, where the six Raptor engines of the Starship are ignited while the stage is still connected to the Super Heavy booster. Russian Soyuz rockets have been using hot staging for decades to guarantee a more effective stage-separation procedure.
“Starship’s second flight test achieved a number of major milestones and provided invaluable data to continue rapidly developing Starship,” SpaceX stated on its online platform. “This rapid iterative development approach has been the basis for all of SpaceX’s major innovative advancements.”
The third Super Heavy Starship test flight’s objectives
The third test mission had loftier objectives: sending the Starship into orbit for a sub-orbital flight with multiple first-of-its-kind tests and landing safely in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, respectively, using both stages.
There were no preparations for the third test flight’s recovery, even though both stages are completely reusable. Stage one was supposed to try a rocket-powered fall in the style of genuine landing procedures, but stage two was supposed to smash into the ocean and sink.
Flight controllers had planned to test the payload door as the Starship coasted toward entry in order to launch Starlink satellites on subsequent missions.
The rocket’s primary mission, according to NASA, was to attempt the first ever restart of a Raptor engine outside of Earth’s atmosphere and to transport cryogenic propellants from one tank to another in space’s weightless environment.
The propellant transfer test and Raptor restart are significant junctures for NASA, which is shelling out billions of dollars to SpaceX to construct a Starship derivative that will function as the Human Landing System, or HLS, for the Artemis moon program.
A fleet of Super Heavy-Starship tankers will automatically refuel the HLS in Earth orbit before it can resume its journey to the moon. Once astronauts board, the spacecraft will transport them to and from the moon’s surface.
See Live Now
