This story originally appeared in WIRING Italy and has been translated from Italian.
SpaceX has reached an important milestone by testing Starship, the spacecraft it wants to use for manned missions to the Moon and Mars. After a test launch yesterday, the Super Heavy booster launched by Starship returned to Earth and landed on its “Mechazilla” launch tower, achieving the first attempt of this maneuver. This success brings SpaceX one step closer to its ambition of making Starship a fully reusable space system.
After separating from Starship after launch and burning most of its fuel, the 70-meter-tall Super Heavy used 13 of its 33 engines for a controlled descent, before shutting down all but three and maneuvering on two metal arms on its launch tower. in Boca Chica, Texas. The entire process, from launch to landing on Mechazilla’s “chopsticks,” as SpaceX has called the arms, lasted seven minutes.
Meanwhile, the Starship spacecraft continued flying for about an hour after separating from Super Heavy, propelling itself with its six engines, before landing in the Indian Ocean.
Starship is the largest and most powerful space vehicle ever built and its purpose is to take astronauts to the Moon and Mars. After a series of increasingly complex test flights, beginning in 2019 with brief tests on a vehicle called Starhopper that initially rose just a few meters above the ground, SpaceX moved on to more ambitious tests of the Starship capsule and Super rocket. Heavy.
The most recent test before yesterday’s took place in June, when both the rocket and the ship managed, despite some serious problems, to survive their re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere and practice landings in the ocean, with Super Heavy simulating their future return to the launch tower maneuvering in a controlled descent to a specific point over the Gulf of Mexico.
Landing rockets after flight is a feat that SpaceX has already managed to accomplish many times with its smallest rocket, the Falcon 9, which is a staple of its current operations. Starship, however, is a much more powerful and complex system than the Falcon 9. With its 33 engines, more powerful than those used on the Falcon, the Super Heavy booster offers approximately 10 times more thrust at takeoff and is much more powerful. . larger piece of machinery, making landing difficult.
Although SpaceX is still in the testing phase with Starship, the goal is to use Super Heavy and the Mechazilla tower to avoid having to build new rockets with each launch, thus greatly reducing the cost of launches and, consequently, making them more frequent. . Rapid reusability will be essential if SpaceX is to achieve its goal of dramatically reducing the time and cost of delivering cargo and people to orbit and deep space. The ultimate goal with Super Heavy, said SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk cnnis to return the rocket to the launch pad within a few minutes of its return, allowing the vehicle to take off again once refueled, in just 30 minutes after landing.
With the success of the Super Heavy landing, SpaceX can now move on to its next challenge: refueling a Starship while it is in orbit, which will be necessary to take one of these spacecraft to the Moon.