Starbase (United States) (AFP) – SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft was set to return to Earth Saturday after a day in orbit, with Elon Musk’s company attempting a first-ever “catch” of the vehicle at the launch pad. It was the 15th test flight of the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket system, and originally meant to feature a groundbreaking twin capture of both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship. But the lower stage recovery attempt on Friday had to be aborted.
A successful recovery of Starship would nevertheless mark a milestone in the space industry’s decades-long pursuit of fully reusable rocket systems — a goal that can drastically reduce mission costs and make frequent launches possible. Flight control gave the final go-ahead Saturday afternoon for the attempt to catch Starship on Starbase’s Launch Pad 2 at around 3:18 pm (2118 GMT). “The launch team conducted the final planned contingency check for (Starship’s) return to the launch site, and great news! All teams have pulled go,” SpaceX commentator Kate Tice said. Added Starship senior manager Jessie Anderson: “If successful, this would prove an orbital launch vehicle can be fully recovered back on its launch pad.”
The Starship spacecraft that gives the rocket system its name orbited Earth 14 times and deployed 26 satellites for Musk’s Starlink satellite internet constellation during its 22-hour journey. The “catch” of Starship is extraordinarily complex because the spaceship will be falling much faster and from a much higher altitude than the booster, which SpaceX has successfully recovered on three previous occasions. Like Super Heavy, Starship is expected to carry out a controlled descent and nestle vertically between two mechanical “chopstick arms” above the launch site.
Its path home was carefully mapped out by engineers. “If you want to get back to the east coast of Texas, you have to fly over the entire continent to get back there. So inevitably, you’re flying over land and we spend a lot of time figuring out the safest way to do that,” senior SpaceX engineer Lars Blackmore said. “Once the rocket is flying over land, there’s 21 minutes where the operators can’t do anything, and so we’re just going to be holding our breath for that time.”
Starship was expected to fly over sparsely inhabited desert areas, weave over towns, and then carry out a “giant swoosh maneuver” in its final approach, looping around the cities of Texas’ Rio Grande Valley and approaching its landing site from the east. Some versions of Starship are designed to launch internet satellites and data centers into orbit, while other iterations will be made to ferry people to the Moon and Mars. US space agency NASA is expecting Starship to serve as a lunar lander on its Artemis mission, and administrator Jared Isaacman congratulated SpaceX on Friday for “another spectacular launch” — without mentioning the booster disappointment.
Musk, the world’s richest person, has already revolutionized the space sector with the partially reusable Falcon rockets, which regularly launch satellites and carry astronauts to the International Space Station. But the Starship project has been plagued by delays as SpaceX grapples with novel engineering challenges, including the unsolved problem of transferring fuel to the spaceship while in orbit — a requirement for any journey to the Moon or Mars. It will also need to further fine-tune the Super Heavy, which ran into a technical issue Friday on its descent, forcing a diversion to the Gulf of Mexico just off the launch site. It automatically self-destructed — a fireball erupting from the booster — before hitting the water.
Following SpaceX’s high-profile stock market debut in June that raised about $85.7 billion, the company is investing heavily in production and launch capabilities. During a tour of its million-square-foot (93,000-square-meter) factory at Starbase on Friday, SpaceX officials told journalists it now has the capability to produce a spaceship every two weeks and a booster every four weeks.
© 2024 AFP
