On Thursday, SpaceX will attempt a second time to launch Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, with the goal of sending astronauts to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
The launch of the massive rocket on Monday was called off less than 10 minutes before the scheduled time due to a pressurisation problem in the first-stage booster.
SpaceX 2nd Attempt
The next window for launch from Starbase, SpaceX’s spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas, begins on Thursday at 8:28 a.m. Central Time (1328 GMT) and will last around an hour, according to SpaceX.
Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, has sought to downplay expectations for the risky initial test flight, casting some question on whether the launch will go place on Thursday.
“The team is working around the clock on many issues,” Musk tweeted late Tuesday. “Maybe 4/20, maybe not.”
For the first time since the Apollo programme ended in 1972, NASA has chosen the Starship spacecraft to take men to the Moon in late 2025 – a mission known as Artemis III.
A 164-foot (50-meter) tall spaceship designed to carry crew and cargo rides atop a 230-foot tall first-stage Super Heavy booster rocket.
The 33 huge Raptor engines on the first-stage booster were successfully tested by SpaceX in February, but the Starship spaceship and the Super Heavy rocket have never flown together. The integrated test flight will evaluate their combined performance.
The launch on Monday was cancelled due to a frozen pressure valve on the Super Heavy booster, and SpaceX had to postpone another attempt for 48 hours in order to recycle the liquid methane and liquid oxygen that powers the rocket. Musk had previously warned that delays and technical concerns were likely.
“It’s a very risky flight,” he said. “It’s the first launch of a very complicated, gigantic rocket.
“There’s a million ways this rocket could fail,” Musk said. “We’re going to be very careful and if we see anything that gives us concern, we’ll postpone.”
Planetary species
NASA will launch personnel into lunar orbit using its own heavy rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), which has been in development for more than a decade.
Starship is larger and more powerful than SLS, capable of launching a cargo weighing more than 100 metric tonnes into orbit.
It has a thrust of 17 million pounds, which is more than double that of the Saturn V rockets used to launch Apollo astronauts to the Moon.
The Super Heavy rocket is scheduled to separate from the Starship around three minutes after launch and splash down in the Gulf of Mexico.
The starship, which has six engines of its own, will fly to an altitude of roughly 150 miles before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii around 90 minutes after launch.
“If it gets to orbit, that’s a massive success,” Musk said.
“If we get far enough away from the launchpad before something goes wrong then I think I would consider that to be a success,” he said. “Just don’t blow up the launchpad.”
SpaceX envisions someday launching a Starship into orbit and then refuelling it with another Starship to continue on its voyage to Mars or beyond. Musk stated that the goal is to make Starship reusable and reduce the cost per flight to a few million dollars.
“In the long run — long run meaning, I don’t know, two or three years — we should achieve full and rapid reusability,” he said.
The eventual objective is to establish bases on the Moon and Mars and put humans on the “path to being a multi-planet civilization,” Musk said.
“We are at this brief moment in civilization where it is possible to become a multi-planet species,” he said. “That’s our goal. I think we’ve got a chance.”
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