South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
SpaceX says Starship ready for launch
Elon Musk and SpaceX are all set to light what will be the most powerful candle to ever launch from Earth.
The company said it would forgo any launch pad run-through this week for its Starship and Super Heavy rocket set for a suborbital test launch from SpaceX’s launch site Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas.
“Teams are focused on launch readiness ahead of Starship’s first integrated flight test as soon as next week, pending regulatory approval — no launch rehearsal this week,” the company posted to Twitter on Tuesday.
The company set up a launch profile for the test flight on its website with April 17 as the initial target date, but that’s just a placeholder for when they get approval from the Federal Aviation Administration.
“As is the case with all developmental testing, this schedule is dynamic and likely to change, so be sure to stay tuned to our social media channels for updates,” the company posted to its website.
Musk has jokingly hinted that he’d like to make the launch on April 20, as he’s a fan of tweeting 4:20, a pop culture reference to the time one should use marijuana. Just this week, for instance, he declared that all of the legacy blue check marks on Twitter will be removed on 4/ 20.
Jokes aside, SpaceX is serious about completing what would be the first launch of the combined Starship and Super Heavy booster. Previous test flights of just the upper stage have flown to limited altitude, and often featured launch pad explosions before the company was satisfied with landing approach and controls.
“These flight tests helped validate the vehicle’s design, proving Starship can fly through the subsonic phase of entry before re-lighting its engines and flipping itself to a vertical configuration for landing,” the company stated.
The next big test is the use of the booster, which is powered by 33 of the company’s Raptor 2 engines that when combined can produce more than 17 million pounds of thrust.
Even if it simply gets off the ground, it would become the most powerful rocket launch ever attempted breaking the 10.2 million pounds of thrust generated during four attempts by the Soviet Union of its N-1 rocket from 1969-1972. Those rockets all suffered failure midflight and never made it to space.
NASA’s Space Launch System rocket that flew on Artemis I last November is the current title holder for rocket power to make it to space when it sent the Orion capsule on its lunar mission through the heft of 8.8 million pounds of thrust. The SLS bested the power of the Saturn V rockets during the Apollo era.
On the pad since early April have been Starship 24, as in the 24th prototype of the company’s next-generation spacecraft, and the Super Heavy 7 booster.
The flight plan calls for the booster to launch east over the Gulf of Mexico where it will separate from Starship, which itself has six Raptor
2 engines. The booster will perform booster maneuvers for a return to Earth, but make a water landing instead of an attempt on a droneship like its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters often do.
Star ship will then progress on a suborbital path around more than two-thirds of the planet before also attempting a water landing near Hawaii.
The goal is for both booster and Starship to be able to make landings so it would become the first fully reusable spacecraft. The booster itself is designed to return to the launch site, assisted in landing by the massive launch and catch tower that stands close to 500 feet tall.
Starship will have the capacity to bring more than 220,000 pounds of crew and cargo to low-Earth orbit, which is slightly more than the current SLS capacity.
“With a test such as this, success is measured by how much we can learn, which will inform and improve the probability of success in the future as SpaceX rapidly advances development of Starship,” the company stated.
Meanwhile, SpaceX is going about its normal business with a Falcon 9 rocket launch from California today on the Transporter-7 rideshare mission, and has lined up its next Falcon Heavy launch from Kennedy Space Center as early as April 18.
The Falcon Heavy launch will be the sixth ever for what is essentially three Falcon 9 rockets strapped together, the most powerful active rocket in SpaceX’s stable until Starship gets up and running.
The mission is to send the ViaSat-3 Americas’ communications satellite into orbit, and unlike previous Falcon Heavy launches, the company plans to not retrieve any of the three first-stage boosters. The launch is slated for 7:36 p.m. which is shortly before sunset, according to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.