SpaceX has conducted its sixth test of the Starship super-heavy rocket. Due to technical problems, it had to cancel its planned Super Heavy booster return operation. However, the spacecraft itself successfully re-entered the atmosphere and splashed down again, despite the more “hard” flight profile.
Failure to catch Super Heavy
The launch of the super-heavy rocket took place normally. The Super Heavy booster successfully separated from Starship, dropped the transition bay, and began its return to the Starbase spaceport, where it was to be picked up by the Mechazilla tower. However, shortly afterward, SpaceX announced that it had canceled the return attempt due to failure to meet landing conditions.
Instead, the booster was sent to the Gulf of Mexico, where it made a successful splashdown. Soon it produced several explosions accompanied by a large fireball. Nevertheless, they didn’t lead to the complete destruction of the booster, and its remains continued to drift in the water.
Banana in space
As for Starship, the spacecraft successfully entered the desired trajectory. During the flight, it performed the first brief restart of one of the Raptor’s engines in space. This experiment was required to demonstrate that the spacecraft could be launched from orbit in future missions.
This time Starship carried a kind of “payload”. It was a banana (its drawing also decorated the spacecraft’s hull). SpaceX explained their choice by saying that a banana was “a common unit of scale that is roughly the size of a single Starlink Mini terminal.” It is worth saying that this is not the first such “culinary” joke of SpaceX. When the company launched its first Dragon cargo spacecraft into space in 2010, there was a head of cheese inside.
Landing at the limit
One of the peculiarities of the past flight was that Starship’s landing took place in a much more “hard” mode. The engineers wanted to test the spacecraft to its limits and get more data on its behavior. To do this, they deliberately removed over 2,000 heat shield tiles from it.
Splashdown confirmed! Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on an exciting sixth flight test of Starship! pic.twitter.com/bf98Va9qmL
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 19, 2024
The spacecraft did well in this test, although one of its flaps sustained damage. In the final section, engineers again tested the spacecraft’s strength limit by putting it into a near-horizontal flight mode. Once again, Starship successfully accomplished the task at hand. After that, the spacecraft performed a rollover maneuver and successfully splashed down in the Indian Ocean. Thus, despite the failed Super Heavy catch, SpaceX managed to complete most of its planned test program.
What’s next for Starship
The upcoming flight was the last test using Starship V1. Next time SpaceX will send Starship V2 into space. The spacecraft will receive a lot of upgrades and will be larger in size, increasing its fuel tank capacity from 1,200 to 1,500 tons. Using Starship V2, engineers intend to practice the following key steps necessary to begin regular operation of the system: orbital re-entry, orbital refueling, and the return of not only the booster but also the spacecraft itself.
SpaceX also said it had begun experiments to test Starship’s heat shield in a simulated Martian atmosphere. The company says it intends to send a spacecraft to the Red Planet as early as 2026.
