SpaceX’s Starship succeeded in the 10th flight test: NPR

The massive Roquette of Starship of SpaceX has accumulated essential successes on its 10th test flight, hitting the key test objectives and breaking a sequence of chess that stuck the spacecraft this year.

The silver and black rocket in two floors, which measures approximately 400 feet high, has downgraded from the SpaceX installation in southern Texas near Boca Chica Beach, just at the launch window at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday evening.

The largest and most powerful rocket ever built, Starship is an essential part of NASA’s efforts to make astronauts on the Moon, and the objective of the CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk, to colonize Mars.

SpaceX also wants to use Starship to deploy many of its Starlink satellites. But during the last test flight, the door of the ship’s user bay did not manage to open.

This time, the door has opened and spacex workers on the ground You could hear applauded on a live webdiffusion while the video brought the view from inside the upper stage of Starship. The video showed a metal device, similar to a huge distributor of Pez, reinforcing and ejecting eight mannequin satellites by the door and in space.

“The last one has been deployed,” said webcast SpaceX commentator Dan Huot. “Heck yeah, everyone!”

As expected, the lower rocket stadium returned to earth and briefly hovered on the waters of the Gulf before splashing. After having deployed the satellite simulators, the upper stadium entered the earth’s atmosphere, allowing SpaceX to study the performance of its thermal shield and its shutters, which Huot noted a little “grilled”.

The video of a buoy has shown that the spacecraft stopped slowly on the Indian Ocean, while SpaceX workers applauded and applauded a little more.

“Splashdown has confirmed! Congratulations to the whole SpaceX team for a tenth fascinating flight test!” Spacex wrote on X.

This smooth flight was very different from three tests earlier this year, which saw the upper stage of the rocket explode or disintegrate for various reasons, much of the chagrin in the space community. “I think there were more problems than the community and perhaps even that SpaceX expected it,” said Carissa Christensen, a satellite expert who is CEO and founder of Brycetech.

Multiple losses of the upper stage, plus a rocket exploded spectacularly on the launch pad In June, led to the space community to watch this vessel test with even more than the usual high level of interest.

“Starship is in many ways the SpaceX flagship program right now,” said Christensen.

However, she points out that no matter what is happening in a single starship test flight, SpaceX’s place as the main American launch company is secure.

“SpaceX leads more than half of the launches in the world,” noted Christensen. “It deploys 80% of world satellites.”

Even if SpaceX worked to launch Starship this week, dealing with delays due to the weather and a problem in a terrestrial system that has in charge of oxygen in the rocket, its other launch activities continued without incident.

On Sunday, a Robotic Spacex capsule carrying food and other supplies for NASA astronauts on the international space station with success on one of the Falcon 9 rockets of Workhorse Falcon 9 of the company. And earlier Tuesday, a Falcon 9 launched and deployed a defense satellite for Luxembourg.