SpaceX launched another of his enormous rockets Starship on a test flight on Monday, successfully circling half the planet while releasing dummy satellites just like the previous occasion.
Starship — the largest, most powerful rocket ever built — rumbled into the evening sky from the southern tip of Texas. The booster separated and made a controlled entry into the Gulf of Mexico as planned, and the craft skimmed space before descending into the Indian Ocean. Nothing was recovered.
“Hey, welcome back to Earth, Starship. What a day.”said Dan Huot of SpaceX as employees applauded.
It was the eleventh test flight for a full-scale Starship, which SpaceX founder and CEO, Elon Muskplans to use to send people to Mars. The need for POT It is more immediate. The space agency can’t put astronauts on the Moon by the end of the decade without the 403-foot-long Starship, the reusable vehicle intended to take them from lunar orbit to the surface and back.
Instead of staying inside Launch Control as is customary, Musk said he would go outdoors for the first time to observe, something “much more visceral.”
The previous test flight in August — a success after a series of failures that ended in explosions — followed a similar trajectory with similar goals. This time more maneuvers were incorporated, especially for the ship. SpaceX conducted a series of tests during the ship’s entry over the Indian Ocean as practice for future landings at the launch site.
As before, Starship transported up to eight dummy satellites that pretend to be SpaceX’s Starlinks. The flight departed from Starbase, near the border with Mexico, and lasted just over an hour.
Sean Duffyacting administrator of NASA, praised the progress of Starship. “Another important step in the direction of placing Americans at the south pole of the Moon,” he expressed on the X social network.
SpaceX is modifying its launch sites at Cape Canaveral to accommodate the Starships, as well as the much smaller Falcon rockets, which are used to transport astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station for NASA.