SpaceX Starship rocket launch: Flight 5 holds the booster

SpaceX launched its fifth test flight of its Starship rocket on Sunday and made an impressive feat of holding the rocket more than 20 stories tall.

The achievement marks a milestone in SpaceX’s goal of making Starship a fully reusable rocket system.

Elon Musk’s company launched Starship at 8:25 a.m. ET from its Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas. The “Super Heavy” rocket booster returned to the arms of the company’s launch tower about seven minutes after launch.

“Are you kidding?” SpaceX communications manager Dan Huot said on the company’s website.

“What we just saw, it looked like magic,” added Huot.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson congratulated SpaceX in a social media post.

“As we prepare to return to the Moon under Artemis, continued testing will prepare us for the bolder missions yet to come,” Nelson wrote.

The starship separated and continued into space, traveling a long distance around Earth before re-entering space and splashing down in the Indian Ocean as it was meant to complete the experiment.

There were no people aboard the fifth flight of the Starship. Company leadership said SpaceX expects to fly hundreds of Starship missions before the rocket launches with any crew.

The full Starship program has flown four spacecraft tests before, with launches in April and November last year, and this March and June. Each test flight achieved more milestones than the last.

SpaceX insists it’s trying to build on “what we’ve learned from previous flights” in its approach to developing a giant rocket.

The Starship system is designed to be fully reusable and aims to be a new way to fly cargo and people across the Earth. The rocket is also important to NASA’s plan to return astronauts to the moon. SpaceX has won a multibillion-dollar contract to operate a Starship spacecraft as a lunar lander as part of NASA’s Artemis lunar mission.

The Federal Aviation Administration issued SpaceX a license to launch a fifth Starship flight on Saturday, sooner than the regulator previously thought. But the company wanted to launch a fifth flight before October, which led SpaceX and Musk to sharply criticize the FAA, saying that “robust environmental analysis” was holding up the process.

Although the FAA and partner agencies the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service conducted the analysis sooner than expected, SpaceX had to pay fines to environmental regulators for unauthorized discharges of water at its Texas launch site. .

With the booster catch, SpaceX exceeded the parameters of the fourth test flight.

The company completed its mission to return the booster to the launch pad and used “chopstick” arms on the tower to hold the vehicle. The company sees the process of holding pride as a key to its goal of making the rocket fully reusable.

“SpaceX engineers have spent years preparing and months testing the booster launch effort, with experts spending tens of thousands of hours building the infrastructure to increase our chances of success,” the company wrote on its website.

Deductions require thousands of conditions to be met, the company said. If it hadn’t been ready, the booster would have left the return path to spread down the coast in the Gulf of Mexico.

“We do not accept compromise when it comes to ensuring the safety of the public and our crew, and recovery will only be attempted when conditions are right,” SpaceX said.

Starship is the longest and most powerful rocket ever built. Fully packed into the Super Heavy booster, the Starship stands 397 feet long and nearly 30 feet wide.

The Super Heavy booster, which is 232 feet long, is what starts the rocket’s journey into space. At its base are 33 Raptor engines, which generate 16.7 million kilograms – about 8.8 million pounds of thrust for NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, which will be launched for the first time in 2022.

The Starship itself, which is 165 feet long, has six Raptor engines – three to be used while in Earth’s atmosphere and three to operate in the vacuum of space.

The rocket is powered by liquid oxygen and liquid methane. A full program requires more than 10 million pounds of propellant to launch.