SpaceX today (May 27) launched its starship Magroqt for the ninth time on a bold Test flight today (27 May), with the first important reuse of Starship Hardware.
The two phases of the starship were separated as a plan on Flight 9, and the upper platform also reached the space, which improved the most recent flights of the huge vehicle. But SpaceX lost both stages before completing his full flying goals.
“Starships made it for scheduled ship engine cutoff, so a big improvement in previous flight!” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on social media after the flight. “Due to leaks, the pressure of the main tank occurred during the coast and re -entry phase. A lot of good data to review.” Musk said that the next three Starship Test launch can be lifted every three to four weeks in the coming days.
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SpaceX is developing starships, which is the largest and most powerful rocket ever, which helps humanity to dispose of the moon and Mars in other functions.
The two phases of the vehicle are a huge booster, called super heavy and a 171-foot tall (52 m) upper-phase spacecraft, known as starship, or simply “ship”. Both are designed to be fully and fasterly re -purpose, and both are powered by SpaceX’s new raptor engine – 33 of them for super heavy and six for ship.
Prior to today, on each occasion from the Starbase Site of SpaceX (which became the newest city in the Lone Star State) in South Texas, a completely stacked starship was removed eight times. Two of those flights took place this year – on 16 January and 6 March. Both had similar mixed results.
“We are trying to do something that is impossible,” SpaceX’s communication team’s Dan Huot said today during the flight 9 webcast, “SpaceX’s communication team’s Dan Huot said today during the flight 9 webcast.
He said, “You are not going to deliver it in a straight line.” “We have said that there is going to be bumps, there will change there. But to see that ship in space today was a hell of a moment for us, so congratulations to every person who put time, effort, sweat, anything in that rocket.”
On Flight 7 and Flight 8, Super Heavy innocent performed innocent, burning its engine and then returned to the starbase for a catch by the launched tower’s “chopstick” weapons. But the ship had problems: It exploded less than 10 minutes after launching on both missions, respectively, the Turks and Kaikos Islands and the Bahamas rained debris.
However, two ship failures occurred at the same time during the flight, they had different root causes, according to SpaceX. The possibility of a powerful “harmonic reaction” was leaked on Flight 7, while a hardware failure in a raptor engine was responsible for flight 8 fireworks, determined by the company.
SpaceX raised pain to reduce the possibility that such issues would harvest on future flights, make significant hardware changes and many engine tests on the ground in Texas. Flight 9 put such work for testing – and it also broke the new land.
The mission today removed from the starbase at EDT (2337 gmt; 6:37 PM local Texas time) at 7:37 pm, sent a 40-storey-Lumb rocket to the Texas sky.
It was a milestone launch, marking the first-world of a super heavy booster; It earned its wings on Flight 7 in January. (SpaceX exchange of four of his raptors after that mission, which means 29 of the flying engines today were flight.)
The company wrote in the preview of the flight 9 mission, “The first booster renewal in the flight and subsequent performances will enable the rapid change of future reflectives as the progress is made to vehicles requiring maintenance between the launch.”
Super Heavy had some different work today; It withdrew a variety of experiments back to Earth. For example, the booster controlled a random return and hit the atmosphere at a different angle instead of flip.
SpaceX wrote in the preview of the mission, “Increasing the volume of atmospheric drag on the vehicle can result in a high angle of attack, which requires a low proponent for the initial landing burn in return.” “Getting real -world data is capable of controlling its flight at this high angle of booster attack, will contribute to better performance on future vehicles, including Super Heavy’s next generation.”
These experiments complicated Super Heavy’s flight profile compared to previous missions, holding a difficult offer in another “chopstick” starbase. Therefore, instead of the risk damaging the launch tower and other infrastructure, SpaceX decided to bring back the booster for “Hard Splashdown” in the Gulf of Mexico on Flight 9.
This plan was, anyway; Super Heavy did not make it far away. Buster broke about 6 minutes and 20 seconds in today’s flight, just after burning its landing.
“Confirm that the booster died,” Huot said during the flight 9 webcast. The Super Heavy flight ended “before it was able to get through the landing burn,” he said.
In contrast, the ship improved its performance slightly this time. It reached space today on a sub -regional trajectory, which took it from the top of the Atlantic Ocean – the vehicle on the same original route took the trimmed flight 7 and flight 8.
But Flight 9 was then strangled to the ship. The vehicle was about to deploy eight dummy versions of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites about 18.5 minutes after the liftoff, which would be the first one landmark for the Starship program. Although this did not happen; The payload door could not open completely, so SpaceX abandoned the attempt to deploy.
Then, about 30 minutes after the launch, the ship began to tumble, according to the huot, was the result of leakage in the ship’s fuel-tank system.
“A lot of them [tanks] Your approach is used for control, “he said.” And so, at this point, we have essentially lost our attitude control with starship. ,
As a result, Spacex abandoned a plan to remove one of the raptor engines of the ship in space, a test that was scheduled to take place about 38 minutes after the launch. And the company abandoned the expectation of a soft splash for the vehicle, instead resigned for a breakup on the Indian Ocean during the reunion of the ship.
So the company will not get all that data about Flight 9. For example, SpaceX removed some heat-sustained tiles of the ship into stress-vicious areas, and also tried many different tile materials, including a single with an active cooling system.
But the company plans to bounce back and try again soon, as was done after Flight 7 and Flight 8.
“This is actually the SpaceX way,” Jesse Anderson, SpaceX Manufacturing Engineering Manager, said during the flight 9 webcast. “As long as we do not find out, we are going to learn, repeatedly and recur.”
editor’s Note: The story was updated to ET on May 27 at 9:20 pm to include the comments of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. It was updated in ET at 8:27 pm, in which the ship’s approach was reported to have lost control and died on the Indian Ocean.
