SpaceX’s massive Super Heavy Starship rocket made it all of the technique to space during its second integrated flight test before being intentionally destroyed roughly eight minutes after launch.
The world’s largest rocket lifted off the pad at 8:03 a.m. EST (13:03 UTC) Nov. 18 from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in South Texas. The 393-foot (120-meter) tall vehicle consisted of a Super Heavy booster and upper stage ship.
“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multiplanetary,” the corporate said in an announcement.
While not the entire flight’s goals were achieved, the test gave the corporate precious data because it continues to refine the system that may help return astronauts to the surface of the Moon for NASA.
Unlike the primary launch in April, the vehicle’s 33 Raptor engines appeared to perform nominally all of the technique to stage separation, which occurred roughly 2 minutes, 50 seconds into flight. SpaceX employed a “hot staging” approach during separation, meaning the Starship upper stage ignited its engines while a small subset of the Super Heavy booster’s engines continued to fireplace.
After stage separation, the ship continued accelerating toward orbital velocity while the Super Heavy booster began a boostback burn.
The plan was to fireplace a complete of 13 engines, boosting the primary stage back toward the Texas coast to perform a powered soft splashdown within the Gulf of Mexico. Nevertheless, inside seconds of the start of that process, several engines began to fail. At 3 minutes, 20 seconds, the flight termination system on the booster was triggered, destroying the vehicle.
Meanwhile, the upper stage ship and its six Raptor engines continued as planned for several more minutes. About 8 minutes into flight, while the vehicle was traveling at a speed of roughly 15,000 miles (24,000 kilometers) per hour at an altitude of 93 miles (150 kilometers), its flight termination system was triggered.
It’s unclear if the ship had finished its planned burn before the self-destruct sequence occurred, or shortly after. During SpaceX’s webcast, SpaceX engineer John Insprucker said teams lost data from the second stage.
“The automated flight termination system on the second stage appears to have triggered very late within the burn as we were headed downrange out over the Gulf of Mexico,” Insprucker said.
Regardless, the flight achieved more milestones than the primary in April. During that launch, the rocket’s engines caused massive damage to the pad infrastructure, which didn’t have a water deluge system. Lower than 4 minutes into flight, after fighting several Raptor engine failures, the vehicle spun uncontrolled before breaking apart.
For the second integrated flight test, SpaceX installed a water deluge system, which appears to have done its job. Moreover, the corporate added a hot-staging ring to help with stage separation.
The milestone the corporate has yet to attain on this early phase of the Starship program is the upper stage reentry, which was planned to occur just north of Hawaii lower than 90 minutes later. Nevertheless, with the destruction of the ship, that goal could have to be attempted in the course of the next flight test.
SpaceX has a contract from NASA value $2.9 billion to construct a lunar lander variant of Starship to send astronauts to the Moon’s surface later this decade. A variety of technologies still have to be developed to ensure that the corporate to satisfy its obligations to the U.S. space agency, but this second integrated test flight showed the corporate is well on its way in making progress.
“Each test represents a step closer to putting the primary woman on the Moon with the #Artemis III Starship human landing system,” said NASA Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development Jim Free. “Looking forward to seeing what will be learned from this test that moves us closer to the following milestone.”