SpaceX successfully launches and lands its mammoth Starship rocket for the first time, marking a major milestone in space exploration
Once again, SpaceX has demonstrated the benefits of exposing rocket hardware to the real-world flight environment.
With its most recent launch, the business accomplished a significant test campaign goal for Starship: the booster and upper stage were successfully splashed back to Earth in controlled ocean landings.
The company’s long-term goal of making Starship the first reusable rocket requires bringing back both the Super Heavy booster and the upper stage, also known as Starship.
However, recovery is necessary to reuse, and SpaceX is demonstrating with Starship that it will be able to accomplish this.
The final objective is to return the Super Heavy and the top stage of the Starship to Starbase, the exclusive Starship launch and development facility owned by SpaceX located in southeast Texas, where they will land vertically on solid ground.
To implement this idea, a controlled ocean splashdown is the first stage. Even SpaceX’s flagship Falcon 9 rocket is only partially reusable—the second stage is used up in orbit—despite being the first business ever to reuse a component of a missile launched into space.
At 8:50 AM CT, Starship, the fourth launch in the rocket test program, lifted off from Starbase. SpaceX intends to utilize the rocket to carry out NASA astronaut missions to the moon, launch larger versions of its Starlink satellites, and eventually establish multi-planetary life.
The test went surprisingly well, considering this is only the fourth time the massive Starship has launched into orbit.
On the Super Heavy booster, only one out of the thirty-three Raptor engines failed, and the business successfully implemented its unique “hot-staging” stage separation method.
(The upper stage’s engines briefly fire while it is still linked to the booster during hot staging, effectively helping to “push” the booster away.)
Additionally, SpaceX safely removed the “hot stage ring” that was positioned between Starship and Super Heavy for the first time, which will help the rocket weigh less when it returns to Earth.
The launcher splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico shortly after takeoff. Starship followed suit more than an hour after launch, making it through the intense heat as it rocketed through the Earth’s atmosphere at hypersonic speeds before splashing down in the Indian Ocean.
To “measure how hot things get without tiles in those locations, while also testing some thermal protection options,” the corporation stated, engineers purposefully changed one of the ship’s 18,000 heat shield tiles with a thinner version and removed two tiles entirely.
Afterward, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk stated on X that even though the boat had a damaged flap and lost “many tiles,” it successfully splashed down.
Musk has previously said that “the biggest remaining problem” in the development of the Starship is the heatshield system.
Since its maiden orbital test flight in April 2023, during which both the rocket’s components exploded in midair, and numerous rocket engines malfunctioned, Starship has undergone much development.
With each successive test going farther, Starship’s orbit was reached for the first time this past March during the third test.
During that test, SpaceX also tested the opening and closing of the payload door, two functions that are essential for delivering payloads to space.
