Donald Trump joined Elon Musk in Texas on Tuesday to witness a successful test launch of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, a demonstration of the unprecedented closeness between the world’s richest man and the newly elected US president.
Trump tweeted before the launch: “I’m headed to the Great State of Texas to watch the launch of the largest object ever elevated, not just into space, but simply off the ground. Good luck to @ElonMusk and the Great Patriots involved in this amazing project!
Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, said he was “honored” to have Trump present at the launch. Texas Senator Ted Cruz also attended.
After liftoff, the rocket launched its first booster stage to Earth. SpaceX foregone returning the booster to the launch site, as it did after a launch last month in a dramatic recovery, opting instead for a fiery splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
No reason was immediately given for the booster setback, but Starship’s upper stage achieved the mission’s primary goal of a long suborbital flight to evaluate hardware and software upgrades from earlier flights this year. Video of the landing showed it exploding into a fireball as it hit the water. SpaceX will recover the stage for evaluation, but regardless of what it discovers, it will not consider its inability to capture the booster a failure.
The upper stage splashed down in the Indian Ocean 1 hour and 5 minutes after takeoff CT at 4 pm and appeared to split into two halves. The segments were expected to sink and will not recover.
Meanwhile, Trump will soon be tasked with making far-reaching decisions about the future of American spaceflight. SpaceX already benefits from billions of dollars in US government contracts and is poised to secure more. The company’s Falcon rockets and Dragon capsules provide NASA’s only spacecraft capable of crewing flights to the international space station, and the Starship lander system was chosen to return humans to the moon, a mission currently scheduled for 2026.
With Musk almost inseparable from Trump since the election, christening himself “First Buddy” and reportedly enjoying enormous influence in shaping the Republican’s second term, their joint appearance at SpaceX’s Starbase complex in Boca Chica for the launch of Starship’s sixth test flight was more than just mutual cheers.
Trump has yet to decide who he wants to be the next NASA administrator as the agency approaches a pivotal moment in its history, and as Musk insists he can land humans on Mars in four years, government support, and more specifically dollars, will be crucial. . Additionally, with growing speculation that NASA is considering abandoning its own Space Launch System rocket program Under a Trump administration, and relying more on the private sector for his return to the lunar surface and future missions to Mars, Musk may emerge with an even stronger hand.
“The founder of the most innovative space company of this century, Elon Musk, successfully used his fortune, time and energy to help elect Donald Trump as president of the United States,” said Ars Technica senior space editor Eric Berger. wrote this month. “It’s entirely possible that SpaceX’s current CEO is the country’s most important advisor on space policy, conflicts be damned.”
Meanwhile, Trump has made no secret of his desire to see humans reach the ambitious goal of reaching Mars during his second term and is reportedly interested in seeing with his own eyes the progress made on what is the world’s fastest-growing rocket. world’s most powerful when fully configured. Tuesday’s launch was Starship’s sixth experimental flight, closely following its first completely successful test in June, when it rose to nearly 130 miles in altitude and orbited Earth before landing intact in the Indian Ocean.
after newsletter promotion
A fifth flight last month provided the spectacle of the Capture of Starship’s recyclable first stage rocket booster. at the Texas launch site with a pair of giant tongs known as chopsticks.
SpaceX was unable to repeat the capture on Tuesday during flight 6, it announced in a tweet that instead it was sending the booster to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
A fireball was visible when it landed, but later video showed the propellant, or at least a substantial remnant of it, floating on the surface. The company ethos is to incorporate expendable prototypes into a path toward long-term progress and discovery. Changes from the previous flight included the removal of more than 2,000 thermal protection plates in the nose of the spacecraft and elsewhere to evaluate revised streamlining capabilities. In addition to the heat shield experiment, SpaceX successfully sent an order to Starship to revive one of its Raptor engines in space for the first time.
SpaceX intends to launch future Starship test missions almost monthly, including from Cape Canaveral in Florida, possibly starting next year. With about 16 million pounds of thrust and a capacity to lift up to 165 tons from the Earth’s surface, Starship is nearly twice as powerful as the Saturn V rockets that sent 12 astronauts to the moon between 1969 and 1972.