This story originally appeared on WIRED Italy and was translated from Italian.
EspaceX has reached a major milestone in testing Starship, the spacecraft it wants to use for crewed missions to the Moon And March. After a test launch yesterday, the Super Heavy booster that launches Starship returned to Earth and landed on its “Mechazilla” launch tower, successfully completing the first-ever attempt of this maneuver. This success brings SpaceX closer to its ambition to make Starship a fully reusable space system.
After detaching from the Starship post-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 shutting down. maneuver on two metal arms on its launch tower. in Boca Chica, Texas. The entire process, from launch to landing on Mechazilla’s “wands,” as SpaceX dubbed the arms, took seven minutes.
Meanwhile, the Starship spacecraft continued to fly for about an hour after detaching from the Super Heavy, propelling itself using its six engines, before crashing into the Indian Ocean.
Starship is the largest and most powerful space carrier ever built, and its goal is to take astronauts to the Moon and Mars. After a series of increasingly complex test flights – which began in 2019 with brief tests of a vehicle called Starhopper that initially rose only a few meters from the ground – SpaceX moved on to more ambitious tests of the Starship capsule and the Super Heavy rocket.
THE most recent test The day before yesterday, it was June, when the rocket and the spacecraft managed, despite some serious problems, to survive their re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere and to practice landings on the ocean, the Super Heavy simulating its future return to the launch tower by maneuvering in a controlled descent to a specific location on the Gulf of Mexico.
Landing rockets after flight is a feat that SpaceX has already managed to accomplish numerous 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. a larger machine, which makes landing more difficult.
Although SpaceX is still in the testing phase with Starship, the goal is to use the Super Heavy Tower and Mechazilla to avoid having to build new rockets for each launch, thus significantly reducing the cost of launches and, therefore , making them more frequent. Rapid reuse will be essential if SpaceX is to achieve its goal of dramatically reducing the time and cost of putting goods and people into orbit in deep space. The ultimate goal with Super Heavy, CEO and founder of SpaceX Elon Musk said CNNinvolves returning the rocket to the launch pad a few minutes after its return, allowing the vehicle to take off once refueled, just 30 minutes after landing.
With the success of the Super Heavy landing, SpaceX can now move on to its next challenge: refueling an orbiting spacecraft, which will be necessary to get one of these spacecraft to the Moon.
