SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket’s 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
This is a pretty big deal, even by Starship standards. The previous 13 flights have followed suborbital trajectories, meaning Starship could reach space but wasn’t actually placed into a stable orbit around Earth. Flight 14 is designed to change that, with SpaceX targeting an orbit roughly 275 kilometers above Earth.
The mission isn’t going up empty-handed either. SpaceX plans to deploy 26 Starlink V3 satellites, marking the first orbital deployment of the company’s next-generation Starlink hardware from Starship. If everything goes according to plan, the mission should last nearly 10 hours, with Starship making roughly six trips around Earth before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile.
The flight will also test several important pieces of the reusable rocket system, including launch, stage separation, the Super Heavy booster’s boostback and its eventual splashdown. In other words, this isn’t simply a case of getting Starship into orbit and calling it a day. SpaceX is testing the machinery needed to eventually make the entire system reusable and fly it far more frequently.
And there’s a fun little milestone hiding in all of this: if successful, this would be the first Starship flight to generate revenue for SpaceX’s launch business, even though the customer is effectively another part of SpaceX.
After years of increasingly ambitious test flights, September 22 could finally be the moment Starship graduates from “massive rocket being tested” to “massive rocket actually doing orbital work.” There is still plenty that can go wrong, and SpaceX is very much treating this as a test, but getting Starship around Earth would mark a significant step toward the fully reusable launch system the company has been building toward.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.
The Hubble telescope has an almost legendary status. Over the last three decades, Hubble gave us some of the most spectacular close-ups of the universe ever captured, and now, NASA’s newest space telescope wants to see the bigger picture. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope successfully launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:26 a.m. EDT on August 30. Roman is now beginning a roughly three-month journey toward the Sun-Earth L2 point, nearly a million miles away, where it will spend its primary five-year mission surveying huge portions of the cosmos.
Roman carries a 2.4-meter primary mirror, the same diameter as Hubble’s, but its Wide Field Instrument can capture a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble’s. NASA expects it to use that combination of sharpness and scale to map billions of galaxies, study dark matter and dark energy, and discover enormous numbers of previously unknown worlds.