Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

On November 19, SpaceX conducted its second flight test of the starship off the southern coast of Texas at around 8: 00 a.m. local time on Saturday. Although both parts of the starship eventually exploded, SpaceX has solved the problem that affected the operation of the starship during its first flight test in April.

SpaceX, a space company led by Elon Musk (Elon Musk), is developing starships. Such giant rockets could change the future of space transportation and help NASA send astronauts to the moon.

Saturday's flight test was not completely successful. SpaceX failed to achieve its ultimate goal of allowing starships to fly around the world, and the starship spacecraft crashed into the Pacific Ocean after an explosion.

But this is the second test flight of the starship, indicating that the company has indeed solved the key problems that occurred in the test earlier in April. All 33 Raptor engines of the super heavy booster in the lower part of the starship have been ignited successfully, and the system has successfully completed the first and second stage separation. When the booster fell off, all six engines carried by the starship spacecraft had been lit up and began to fly into space.

"it's beautiful," John John Insprucker, a SpaceX engineer and live launch commentator, said on SpaceX's webcast.

By contrast, SpaceX severely damaged the launch pad during its first test of the starship; several engines on the super-heavy booster failed, flames destroyed the steering system, and the flight termination system took too long for the starship to explode automatically.

According to SpaceX's "fail fast, learn faster" rocket design approach, success in avoiding a repeat of past failures is a major step forward.

However, the second flight test also revealed many challenges that SpaceX engineers had to overcome.

The super heavy booster exploded shortly after it was separated, which was, in the jargon of rocket engineers, an "unplanned rapid disintegration". The starship spacecraft flew into Earth orbit for a few minutes, reaching an altitude of more than 90 miles, but SpaceX lost contact with it after the flight termination system detonated the spacecraft.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said in a statement that there were no reports of casualties or property damage. The agency will conduct accident investigations, which is standard practice when there is something wrong with commercial rockets.

SpaceX engineers must now figure out what's wrong with super-heavy booster and starship spacecraft, fix it, and then try again.

The starship is the largest and most powerful rocket in history. The goal of SpaceX is to make both parts of the system fast and fully reusable. This will allow starships to launch larger and heavier payloads into space and significantly reduce the cost of sending satellites, space telescopes, people and the necessities of life into space.

The starship completed its second flight test at a time when Musk once again faced a watershed in his career. The serial entrepreneur previously changed electronic payments with PayPal and electric cars with Tesla. As SpaceX prepared for the flight test on Friday, Disney and Apple announced a moratorium on advertising spending on Musk's social network X.

Many industry observers are optimistic that SpaceX will make the starship fully operational.

Phil Larson (Phil Larson) served as a White House space adviser during the Obama administration and later worked in communications at SpaceX. "they have solved the problems found in the first flight test and made this type of aircraft go further," he said. "the magic of engineering is to learn, iterate and fly again soon."

Daniel L. Dumbacher, executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics), agrees. "this is a large launch system," he said. "there is still some work to be done to get it where it needs to go. I have no doubt that the SpaceX team can figure out how to make the launch vehicle work."

A few hours before sunrise on Saturday, engineers began injecting liquid oxygen and liquid methane into the ship. There was some fog near the ground, but except for a few wisps of cirrus, the sky was clear.

The countdown went smoothly and paused for a moment with 40 seconds left in the countdown clock. Then the system starts the launch countdown again. Just after 8 a.m., the last seconds of the countdown passed, and the 400-foot-tall rocket lifted off slowly. The new flood system seems to protect the launch pad from rising clouds of dust and debris as it did in April.

A few seconds later, spectators watching the launch from the launch site 8km south of Padre Island felt the shock wave.

Two minutes and 48 seconds after liftoff, the starship successfully completed the trickiest "thermal separation" of the flight test. Before the super heavy booster fell off, the six engines carried by the starship spacecraft in the upper part of the system were ignited smoothly, causing loud cheers at the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

Half a minute later, the super heavy booster flashed when it exploded, and the booster splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico and sank to the bottom of the sea. Starships and spacecraft continue to move into space. But a few minutes later, SpaceX lost contact with the Starship, and the webcast fell silent.

On South Padre Island, thousands of people who got up early to watch the rocket launch said they enjoyed the spectacle. At 04:30 in the morning, a long line of cars waited in the dark to enter Blanca Island Park at the southern tip of South Padre. Others choose to walk from the hotel to avoid traffic jams. The boat full of spectators floated on the sea outside the restricted area.

The launch was witnessed not only by people in coastal areas, but also by people farther away.

Emma Guevara, a resident of Brownsville, southern Texas, lives west of the SpaceX launch site. She said the launch shook her house.

"it was much earlier than we expected, so everyone woke up," Guevara said.

Senior NASA officials congratulated SpaceX.

"each test represents a step closer to sending the first woman to the moon using the Artemis 3 manned landing system." "look forward to seeing what we can learn from this test to bring us closer to the next milestone," Jim Free, NASA's deputy director of discovery system development, wrote on social media X.

The speed with which SpaceX solves the starship problem will determine the speed at which NASA astronauts return to the moon.

NASA has signed a contract with SpaceX to convert the starship into a manned lunar module to send two astronauts to the moon's south pole. Even before the starship test flight, the first astronaut landing on the moon was thought to have been postponed until 2026. SpaceX will also provide a starship for the second manned mission to the moon in 2028.

In order for NASA astronauts to successfully land on the moon, SpaceX needs not only a starship that can fly normally, but also nearly 20 launches, because starships bound for the moon must be refilled with propellant before leaving Earth orbit.

To this end, SpaceX is planning to develop two other versions of starships.

One of them is actually an orbital gas station in space, which can be compared to a warehouse for storing propellants. Another starship is used to transport methane and liquid oxygen to orbiting gas stations and refill the warehouse with propellant through a series of round-trip flights. Starships that need to go to the moon or Mars will be launched from the ground, docked in propellant depots and refilled with propellant, but no one has yet tried to pump tons of propellant in zero gravity.

When the warehouse moves around the earth, the outside will get warmer and colder because of whether the sun shines or not. How to keep the propellant in the warehouse at ultra-low temperature will be a challenge.

At a meeting of the NASA advisory committee on Friday, Lakiesha Hawkins, assistant deputy director of NASA, said the number of starship launches would be around "ten times".

Hawkins said the starship would be launched "in a six-day cycle" from the Kennedy Space Center (Kennedy Space Center) in Florida and the current SpaceX launch site in Texas.

NASA does have a backup plan. This year, NASA chose Blue Origin, a space company founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, to design a second lunar module. The lunar module is smaller and is planned for the third lunar landing after 2029.

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