Elon Musk has just proved that the world’s largest, most powerful, fully-reusable rocket is now a reality. The 5th test attempt of Musk’s ‘Starship’, which consists of the ‘ship’ upper half and ‘booster’ lower half, successfully returned the booster component to the launchpad, where it was ‘caught’ out of mid air by two giant mechanical arms.
SpaceX’s Boca Chica Texas-based launch tower, often called ‘mechazilla’ uses enormous arms to both stack the booster and ship on the launch pad, but also to gently catch the booster and return it exactly to the point where it started.
This will enable SpaceX’s vision of rapid reusability, where the booster and ship can be launched again and again from the same pad, without needing to be moved, and the booster doesn’t require heavy or complicated landing legs.
Success after success
The booster catch was one in a string of successes, starting with hot stage separation, where the ship lit its engines to separate from the booster. Then, the hot staging ring was jettisoned from the top of the booster, followed by a 13-engine boost back burn, which rapidly slowed the booster’s velocity. After a few nail biting moments, the booster catch attempt was given the go-ahead. Otherwise, the booster was planned to land in the ocean if its velocity or trajectory did not meet the landing criteria.
The booster slowed itself further with a 3 engine burn and gently descended between the tower arms, which closed onto two mounting pins before the engines cut off.
There were a few nail-biting moments after the booster shut down while a fire burned over the methane and oxygen valves, however this seemed to diminish on its own. There also appeared to be some damage to one of the chines, and I’m sure we’ll hear more about this later, but the booster looked in pretty good shape, along with the landing mount and tower arms.
Starship on target
While all of this was happening, there was still lots of excitement as the top half, Starship, had a perfect orbital insertion. There were no payload-door tests on this flight, and after about 30 minutes, Starship began to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere.
As Starship is moving incredibly fast, with speeds nearing 27,000km/hr, returning to Earth requires it to bleed off a tremendous amount of speed, creating a lot of heat. The last landing attempt, where the Starship’s forward flaps were nearly destroyed because of heat-tile failure, some modifications to this area helped it move through the atmosphere with less damage. This meant that Starship was able to glide to it landing point in the Indian Ocean, perform a swing manoeuvre, where it moves from belly-flop position to engines down, and landed gently on the water.
All went quite smoothly, however, the heat tile insulation still appeared to fail at the forward flaps hing points, but not as severely as the last launch. Starship’s design has been significantly changed repositioned and smaller forward flaps in the next version (Starship Block 2), so this isn’t really an issue, and a great opportunity for the engineers to gather valuable data.
Once Starship softly landed in the ocean, it tipped over, treating spectators to a firefly explosion as the vehicle seemed to split in two before sinking beneath the waves.
Another step forward
All up, SpaceX’s exhilarating 5th launch attempt was a resounding success and being able to catch the booster on the first attempt stunned many who expected an abort or, more spectacularly, the booster crashing into the launch tower and pad.
If you’re been following the development of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, you’ll already know that the booster stands 70 meters tall, with starship another 51 meters, making the entire stack 121 meters. And with a 9 meter diameter, it is simply massive, and will enable the most payload delivered to orbit from a single launch ever.
With Starship’s size, the implications are mind-blowing, allowing for larger objects to be delivered to space, and at less cost-per-kilogram than ever before. Starship will help humanity develop colonies on the Moon, and then Mars, but for this to happen, Starship’s booster needed a successful catch attempt, and now it has earned its place in history.
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