On Nov. 19, SpaceX performed a smooth sixth test launch for Starship at their Star Base in Boca Chica, Texas. The team was unable to recover the second stage booster of the rocket for reuse, which is something they were hoping to do after their major success during the last launch.
Starship is designed to soon become the first fully reusable rocket, while also being the largest and most powerful. It towers at 397 feet with six raptor engines on the ship and 33 on the booster.
The ship consists of three parts, the Superheavy: a booster that pushes the rocket off of Earth and later detaches, the Hot Stage Ring, and the Starship itself. As of now, the ship is not fully reusable, but it will be once designs smooth out. SpaceX wants to be able to recover the booster and the ship by catching it with the launch tower that has two mechanical arms sticking out of it.
Test launch six had four goals before the flight began: pushing the Starship to its absolute limits, retesting the heat protection on the ship, reigniting the engines while in space to ensure that in future mission it will be able to perform a deorbit burn and improving the booster catch with the launch tower.
The flight went smoothly with a successful launch and a well executed hot stage separation. Due to some technical worries about the launch tower, the team decided to call off the booster catch, and it instead landed in the Gulf of Mexico before exploding.
The starship, after separating, then continued its journey as it began its coast and performed a successful reignition of the raptor engines in Earth’s orbit before landing safely in the Indian Ocean.
SpaceX says the data gathered after the flight was from “The multiple thermal protection experiments, as well as the successful flight through subsonic speeds at a more aggressive angle of attack. [This provides] invaluable feedback on flight hardware performing in a flight environment as we aim for eventual ship return and catch.”
This launch was also the first to have a physical item within the ship, a payload, during the flight, to indicate the strength of gravity when the ship was in the Earth’s orbit.
This payload also served as a way for SpaceX to do a test run in the process of gaining approval from the Federal Aviation Administration for their cargo. Out of playfulness from the engineering team, this item was a toy banana which has been often used for this purpose before.
Kate Tice, an engineer at SpaceX, said during the live broadcast of the launch, “[Getting FAA approval is] something that we’re hoping to do next year if we start flying our first Starlink satellites on Starship.”
Launch six’s preceding test was on Oct. 13, and was a major breakthrough that shocked the whole SpaceX team when they recovered the booster of the ship for the first time for reuse. The launch tower was designed to catch the booster with two arms that the ship rests on as it comes down and it almost flawlessly did so. Other than the successful catch, the flight gave the team at SpaceX vital data for the future.
The next test launch is planned to be on Jan. 11 next year with new plans to make a bigger version of the rocket with an improved design. Since the rocket will be different, it was confirmed that no catch will be attempted under any circumstances.
The end goal of these rockets is to have them mass produced to deliver satellites to space, and to send them to the moon and eventually mars with astronauts. Each test launch is bringing the team closer to making this goal into a reality.
Tice says, “With our pace of rapid iteration…, the moon and Mars are not nearly as far in the future as you may think. In fact we’re planning to send Starship to Mars as soon as 2026.”
