STARBASE: SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft was ‘healthy’ as it orbited the Earth and on track to return on Saturday to its Texas launch site, where Elon Musk’s company was planning to ‘catch’ the vehicle for the first time.
It was the 15th test flight of the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket system, originally meant to feature a groundbreaking twin capture of both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship. Successful recoveries of both stages would have marked a milestone in the space industry’s decades-long pursuit of fully reusable rocket systems that can drastically reduce mission costs and make frequent launches possible.
But that achievement slipped out of reach minutes after the 124-metre rocket blasted off Friday afternoon from its launch pad at Starbase. After the mid-air separation of the two stages, the Super Heavy booster was initially set for capture at Launch Pad 2, SpaceX spokesman Dan Huot said. But near the end of its descent ‘the booster aborted itself for a GNC (guidance, navigation and control) issue that it detected,’ he said.
It diverted instead to the Gulf of Mexico just off the launch site, where it automatically self-destructed before hitting the water. Meanwhile, the Starship spacecraft that gives the rocket system its name was orbiting the Earth, which it was expected to do 14 times before returning on Saturday.
‘Starship and its heat shield are healthy,’ SpaceX said around seven hours after the mission started. ‘We’re not tracking any issues right now with the vehicle or with the range for our return, so everything continuing to look good,’ Huot said. Starship launched 26 satellites to join others in Musk’s Starlink satellite internet constellation.
Complex catch Clayton Swope, an aerospace expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, called the mission a ‘mixed bag so far’ after the failure to catch the Super Heavy, something SpaceX has done three times previously. ‘At least the Starship made it to orbit, like on the last test flight,’ he said. Some versions of the Starship spacecraft are designed to launch internet satellites and data centres into orbit, while other iterations will be made to ferry people to the Moon and Mars.
US space agency Nasa is counting on Starship to serve as a lunar lander on its Artemis mission, and administrator Jared Isaacman congratulated SpaceX on Friday for ‘another spectacular launch’ without mentioning the booster disappointment.
SpaceX plans to return Starship to Earth after more than 22 hours of flight and recover it at around 3:20pm on Saturday.
The ‘catch’ is extraordinarily complex because the spaceship will be falling much faster and from a much higher altitude than the booster. Like the three previous Super Heavy recoveries, Starship is meant to carry out a controlled descent and nestle between two mechanical ‘chopstick arms’ at the launch site.-AFP