SpaceX is planning to fly its massive Starship rocket — the most powerful ever built — for the 11th time on Monday, October 13.
The 123-meter-tall rocket will lift off from SpaceX’s Starbase site near Boca Chica, Texas, creating a colossal 17 million pounds of thrust as it roars toward space.
Following stage separation, the upper-stage Ship spacecraft will take a suborbital route before attempting a soft, controlled landing in the Indian Ocean, similar to the one it achieved on its 10th flight in August.
The first-stage Super Heavy will also aim for a soft, controlled landing on water, rather than heading back to the launch site.
The Starship’s fifth, seventh, and eighth flight tests saw the 71-meter-tall Super Heavy booster nail spectacular landings back at Starbase just minutes after sending the Ship on its way. The autonomous landing involves giant mechanical arms on the launch tower securing the booster just meters above the ground. Landing it in this way allows SpaceX to use the Super Heavy multiple times, drastically reducing mission costs.
So why have the Super Heavy’s more recent flights targeted water landings, depriving fans of that astonishing Starbase landing?
The reason is that SpaceX has been testing a more efficient descent that uses a higher angle of attack. The ocean landing eliminates the risk of damage to the launch site in the event of a major anomaly occurring during the rocket’s descent.
It’s not clear when SpaceX will start bringing the Super Heavy back to Starbase, but we won’t be surprised to see it happening again some time next year. The Elon Musk-led spaceflight company also wants to land the Ship back at Starbase, so fans can look forward to witnessing a double-landing event within an hour of launch.
Once operational, the Starship will be used for crew and cargo flights to the moon, and even Mars.
If you’re interested in watching a livestream of Monday’s flight test, Digital Trends has all the information you need to know.
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
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.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
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.