Key points:
- Elon Musk's SpaceX sends off and then landed the newest model of its Starship rocket on Wednesday.
- The flight was the fifth high-altitude test of a Starship model and the first that came to an end without the rocket crashed.
- Musk's company is growing Starship to originate cargo and people on missions to the moon and Mars.
On this Wednesday, Elon Musk's SpaceX launched successfully and landed the latest model of its Starship rocket. It settled in one piece, and as the official live stream came to an end. Tiny methane fire can be still found at the base, but so far, it has remained intact.
Elon Musk tweeted "Starship landing nominal" as he plans for his presentation on Saturday Night Live, and a stream from columnists in the area reveals that SN15 will remain to stand on the pad. At the beginning of this month, $3 billion has been awarded to SpaceX by NASA to establish a lunar variation of Starship to transport astronauts to the moon for the sake of the agency's Artemios missions.
Earlier this month, NASA awarded SpaceX a nearly $3 billion contract to build a lunar variation of Starship to carry astronauts to the moon's surface for the agency's Artemis missions. Though, while Musk's company persists in moving forward with Starship evolution, NASA put on hold SpaceX work on the HLS program after Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Leidos' subsidiary Dynetics each registered objections to the NASA settlement grant.
The Starship SN15 flight was quite similar to the ones SpaceX has conveyed in the prior six months, with the inspection flights of models SN8, SN9, SN10 and SN11. While all of the previous rockets launched firmly and completed various expansion goals, all four prototypes were explosively demolished– SN8 and SN9 on collision during landing trials, SN10 a few minutes after landing, and SN11 minutes before its landing trial.
The SN11 transportation didn't get it back to the ground, while SN10 settled briefly before collapsing after landing too severely and damaging its legs. With one solid high-altitude test below its area, SpaceX has gone closer to its conception of reusable Starships that fly to the ISS, the moon, around the Earth and beyond.
The Starship models stand at about 150 feet tall, or about the size of a 15-story building, and three Raptor rocket engines power all. It is composed of stainless steel. It resembles the last variant of the rocket that Musk revealed in 2019. SpaceX recorded in a report on its website that SN15 features "vehicle improvements across structures, avionics and software" associated with the previous Starship models.
"Specifically, a new enhanced avionics suite, updated propellant architecture in the aft skirt, and a new Raptor engine design and configuration," announced. The Federal Aviation Administration, which has an investigator at SpaceX's facilities to observe the test flights, conducted a "mishap" investigation of the SN11 flight.
Last week the FAA announced the authorisation of the following three Starship launches – Starship SN15, SN16, and SN16 – saying it will "verify that SpaceX implemented corrective actions arising from the SN11 mishap investigation." The FAA authorised multiple launches at once "because SpaceX is making few modifications to the launch vehicle and relied on the FAA's approved methodology to calculate the risk to the public."
However, Elon Musk has promised a lunar excursion in 2023 to the Japanese online retail billionaire Yusaku Maezawa. Mr Maezawa will fly around the moon in a Starship with eight other members. Musk has also stated that he will initiate transporting on uncrewed aviation to Mars in 2024. Even if the founder's timelines might appear positive at times, he has also acquired a status for ultimately reaching his ends, no matter how formidable.
