The third test flight of SpaceX’s immense Starship rocket ended this Thursday, March 14, with the loss of the vessel upon its return to Earth, but the American space company was pleased to having fulfilled new objectives.”Starship has never flown so far and so fast,” said a commentator during the live video from billionaire Elon Musk’s company.
The takeoff took place from SpaceX’s “Starbase” space base in Boca Chica, in the far south of Texas, like the first two tests which ended in spectacular explosions last year. For this third test, SpaceX said it wanted to accomplish several “ambitious objectives”.
A “hard landing”
At 120 meters high, Starship is the largest rocket in the world. She is also the most powerful. The rocket is made up of two stages: the Super Heavy propulsion stage, and above it the Starship, which by extension gives its name to the entire rocket.
The two stages successfully separated a few minutes after takeoff. Super Heavy was then supposed to land softly in the Gulf of Mexico, but did not completely succeed in this maneuver and experienced a “hard landing”, according to a commentator during the company’s live video.
The ship continued its course for about an hour. It has gone well beyond the frontier of space, reaching an altitude of more than 200 km according to the SpaceX video, followed by more than three million people. It had to fall back into the Indian Ocean to complete the test (without surviving the impact). But the ship was “lost” on its way back to Earth, one commentator said.
Impressive images captured by a camera on the craft showed it illuminated with orange plasma as it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, driven by heat caused by friction. It was the first time that SpaceX tested the effectiveness of the spacecraft’s heat shield, made up of 18,000 black tiles, during such a flight.
Billionaire Elon Musk’s company is banking on Starship to achieve its stated goal: making humanity a multiplanetary species by installing it on Mars. Its development is also very important for NASA, which is counting on this vessel to land its astronauts on the Moon during its Artemis 3 mission, planned for 2026.