Spacex Starship sticks landing in S. Texas — for a bit anyway
A few minutes of elation, then the rocket blows up
Starship SN10 stuck its landing Wednesday in South Texas, lowering itself to the ground with the power and grace of a gymnast as opposed to the explosive fireball seen by its predecessors.
But then, after sitting on the launchpad for a few minutes, it followed its predecessors toward the light.
The SN10 explosion was not ideal, but its initial soft and upright landing was a major milestone for Spacex. The company has launched three Starship prototypes from Boca Chica in less than three months.
With each launch, three Raptor engines ignited to propel the vehicle upward. The engines were shut down one at a time, causing the Starship prototype to enter a horizontal, belly-flop-like position. Then the engines were supposed to reignite and flip the vehicle for a gentle vertical landing.
Both SN8 and SN9 landed hard and in flames. SN10, however, successfully reignited its three engines to perform a flip maneuver, then shut down two engines and landed softly using the power of one engine. The vehicle looked like it was leaning, but it was initially upright.
“Starship SN10 landed in one piece!” Spacex founder Elon Musk said on Twitter. Adding, “Spacex team is doing great work! One day, the true measure of success will be that Starship flights are commonplace.”
Spacex is developing the Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy
Yes, it is. I can’t say it’s surprising because we’ve been here twice before, right? We started to get back to a 5 percent positivity rate and then very quickly gone back up. So there’s something in human nature. I can’t say that I’m surprised, but it’s really disappointing.
The good thing is that compared to some other cities, I think San Antonio does have a culture of mask wearing, and we are going to do everything we can to reinforce that. It’s hard when there are conflicting messages coming from different levels of government. People are going to hear the message they want to hear.
What we’ve seen in the U.K. and in Brazil is that the new variants are much more easily transmitted, and people who have been infected before can be infected again. So we can’t be too smug about, “Oh, we’ve got vaccines” and “We’ve had a high number of people infected, so it’s safe now.” We’re so close, but it’s
We haven’t been able to see the effects yet. And there are a few different factors working in opposite directions, because we didn’t have any mass gatherings. Nobody was going to work. Nobody was going to school. Nobody was going to restaurants. So we’ll have to see how it plays out, but it is concerning.
That’s the hard part about this — keeping the message new and interesting because our message really hasn’t changed, right? Wear a mask, keep a healthy distance and wash your hands. The one new thing is making sure that you have a well-fitting mask. We’ve seen more guidance about that from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The part that is different now is that because of the variants, we are in a race against time. We are in a race to get everybody vaccinated before those variants (become) the most common strain in the whole country, which the CDC is predicting by the middle or end of March.
laura.garcia@express-news.net rocket to carry people to the moon, Mars and beyond. The Starship capabilities demonstrated Wednesday — a controlled, aerodynamic descent and vertical landing — will be critical for landing on Mars, where runways don’t exist, and returning to Earth.
In this development phase of Starship, Spacex operates with a fast-paced cadence of building, testing, failing, fixing and retesting. SN10, which stands for Serial No. 10, is an example of that — taking lessons learned from the previous “RUDS.” This stands for Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly, i.e. a crash.
“Congratulations to the Starship team of Texas,” John Insprucker, principal integration engineer for Spacex, said while narrating the company’s live video feed. “They’ve steadily increased the test launch cadence over the course of the program and have delivered some of the most exciting test flights many of us have seen in a long time.”
He gave these comments before the SN10 explosion. Now SN10, which traveled 6 miles above South Texas, will provide data for future launches.
Additional suborbital test vehicles are being built, and SN11 will be rolled to the launchpad in the near future.