SpaceX senior executive Lars Blackmore on Sunday said that the company gambled with the technology aimed at entering its ambitious Starship vehicle back to Earth from orbit.
What Happened: “…landing Starship on the ocean feels as significant as Falcon 9's first landing,” Blackmore, who is responsible for entry, descent, and landing of the Starship rocket, wrote on X.
The Starship relies on flaps to re-enter Earth from orbit instead of wings and the company gambled on the success of the method, he said. Until the recent flight test when the launch vehicle made it back through Earth’s atmosphere, there was still a chance that the method and the ship designed around the method would “fundamentally not work,” the executive said.
“Flight 4 showed that the gamble paid off, and it feels like only a matter of time until we iterate ourselves to a fully and rapidly reusable rocket,” Blackmore wrote.
The successful flight test Blackmore referred to was conducted earlier this month on June 6th.
The Starship Success Story: During the test flight, the two stages of the vehicle- the Starship spacecraft and the Super Heavy booster- separated and the booster subsequently had a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. The spacecraft ignited its own engines and went on to space, made a controlled re-entry to Earth, and had a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean. The entire flight lasted one hour and six minutes from launch.
The key objective of the flight was to re-enter Earth and the mission achieved it. However, it lost many hexagonal heat-shield tiles designed to protect against the extreme heat of reentry to Earth's atmosphere in the process.
Why It Matters: SpaceX is expected to have at least six flights of the Starship this year, as per CEO Elon Musk‘s latest estimate from March. NASA is currently relying on the success of Starship to land humans back on the moon. The last crewed lunar mission occurred in 1972 with Apollo 17. Since then, no crew has traveled beyond low-Earth orbit.
SpaceX, meanwhile, is aiming to land humans on Mars aboard the launch vehicle which stands 121 meters tall and weighs about 5,000 tonnes.
The two-stage Falcon 9 is currently the company’s workhorse. SpaceX succeeded in landing the first stage of the Falcon 9 on a ground pad in late 2015 and on a drone ship in early 2016, marking the first attempts towards reusability.
SpaceX is currently looking to ensure full reusability for its Starship rocket. Reuse of rockets, the company believes, is integral to bringing down the costs of spaceflight as the most cost is taken up in building the launch vehicle.
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