The Super Heavy booster landed on the company’s launch tower during Starship’s fifth flight on October 13, 2024.
space x
SpaceX launched the fifth test flight of its Starship rocket on Sunday, with a dramatic first catch of the rocket’s more than 20-story-tall booster.
This accomplishment marks a major milestone toward SpaceX’s goal of making Starship a fully reusable rocket system.
Elon Musk’s company launched Starship from its Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas, at 8:25 a.m. ET. The rocket’s “super heavy” booster returned to land on the company’s launch tower arm about seven minutes after liftoff.
“Are you kidding me?” SpaceX communications manager Dan Huot said on the company’s webcast.
“What we just saw was like magic,” Huot added.
SpaceX captured the Starship rocket’s first stage “Super Heavy” booster on October 13, 2024.
Sergio Flores | AFP | Getty Images
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson congratulated SpaceX in a social media post.
“As we prepare to return to the Moon under Artemis, continued testing will prepare us for the bold missions that lie ahead,” Nelson wrote.
The spacecraft separated and continued into space, circling the Earth halfway before re-entering the atmosphere and splashing down in the Indian Ocean to complete its tests.
There were no passengers on Starship Flight 5. Company executives said SpaceX plans to fly hundreds of Starship missions with crews before the rocket launches.
Starship’s complete system has undergone four spaceflight tests to date, launching in April and November of last year, and in March and June of this year. Each test flight achieved more milestones than the last.
SpaceX emphasizes that it is building on “what we have learned from previous flights” in its approach to developing its giant rocket.
SpaceX’s Starship will lift off from Starbase near Boca Chica, Texas, on October 13, 2024, during the rocket’s fifth flight test.
Sergio Flores | AFP | Getty Images
The Starship system is designed to be completely reusable and aims to become a new way to fly cargo and people beyond Earth. The rocket is also important to NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the moon. SpaceX has won a multibillion-dollar contract from NASA to use Starship as a manned lunar lander as part of NASA’s Artemis moon program.
The Federal Aviation Administration issued SpaceX a license to launch Starship’s fifth flight on Saturday, earlier than regulators had previously expected. But the company wants to launch its fifth flight sooner than October, prompting both SpaceX and Musk to vocally criticize the FAA for “excessive environmental analysis” that is hampering the process. Ta.
The FAA and its partner agencies, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Commerce’s National Marine Fisheries Service, conducted the assessment sooner than expected, but SpaceX must pay fines to environmental regulators for unauthorized water releases at its Texas launch site. I had to.
Goals on the 5th flight
SpaceX Starship is seen on the launch pad ahead of its third flight test from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, on March 12, 2024.
Chandan Khanna | AFP | Getty Images
With the booster catch, SpaceX passed the fourth test flight milestone.
The company achieved its goal of returning the booster to the launch site, using a “chopstick” arm on the tower to catch it. The company believes its ambitious capture approach is critical to its goal of making its rockets fully reusable.
“SpaceX engineers spent years preparing for the booster capture attempt, months of testing, and tens of thousands of hours building the infrastructure to maximize the chances of success. ” the company said on its website.
The company says the catch must meet thousands of criteria. If it hadn’t been prepared, the booster would have veered off its return trajectory and instead would have sprayed the waters off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
“We will not accept any compromises when it comes to ensuring the safety of our people and our teams, and will only attempt to return when conditions are right,” SpaceX said in a statement.
rocket
Starship is the tallest and most powerful rocket ever launched. Fully stacked on its Super Heavy booster, Starship is 397 feet tall and approximately 30 feet in diameter.
The 232-foot-tall superheavy booster is the beginning of the rocket’s journey into space. At its base are 33 Raptor engines that together generate 16.7 million pounds of thrust. That’s nearly double the 8.8 million pounds of thrust of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, which first launched in 2022.
The 165-foot-tall Starship itself has six Raptor engines, three of which operate in Earth’s atmosphere and three in the vacuum of space.
The rocket is powered by liquid oxygen and liquid methane. The entire system requires more than 10 million pounds of propellant to launch.
