Posted on 03/03/2021 7:22:54 PM PST by Yo-Yo
The big boom notwithstanding, it's a major milestone for SpaceX.
SpaceX's latest Starship prototype went out in a blaze of glory.
The Starship SN10 spacecraft touched down successfully after a high-altitude test flight today (March 3), a major milestone for the company and its crewed Mars ambitions. But the vehicle didn't manage to hold itself together, exploding about eight minutes after landing.
The big stainless-steel SN10 (short for "Serial No. 10") launched from SpaceX's South Texas site at 6:15 p.m. EST (2315 GMT), rose 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) into the sky and then came back to Earth for a smooth touchdown 6 minutes and 20 seconds after liftoff.
Video: Watch SpaceX's Starship SN10 land and explode
It was the third high-altitude test flight for a Starship vehicle but the first to feature a successful landing. SN10's two immediate predecessors, SN8 and SN9, flew well during their jaunts — on Dec. 9, 2020 and Feb. 2 of this year, respectively — but both hit the ground hard and ended up in pieces.
"Third time's a charm, as the saying goes," SpaceX principal integration engineer John Insprucker said during SpaceX's launch webcast today. "We've had a successful soft touchdown on the landing pad that’s capping a beautiful test flight of Starship 10."
But that wasn't the end of the story. Some flames were visible near SN10's base shortly after landing, and that was a sign of things to come: the vehicle exploded on the landing pad at about 6:30 p.m. EST (2330 GMT), rising up and crashing down again in a huge fireball.
SpaceX is developing Starship to get people and payloads to the moon, Mars and other distant destinations, and to fly any other missions the company requires. Indeed, SpaceX plans to eventually phase out its other flight hardware — the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets and Dragon cargo and crew capsules — and let Starship shoulder the entire load, company founder and CEO Elon Musk has said.
Starship consists of two elements: a 165-foot-tall (50 meters) spacecraft called Starship and a giant rocket known as Super Heavy, both of which are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. Both will be powered by SpaceX's next-generation Raptor engine — six for Starship and about 30 for Super Heavy, Musk has said.
The final Starship will be brawny enough to get itself off the moon and Mars, but it will need Super Heavy's help to get off our much more massive Earth. After launching Starship to Earth orbit, the huge booster will come back down to Earth for a vertical landing, as Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy first stages already do.
Musk believes that Starship's combination of rapid reusability and power — the system will be able to loft more than 110 tons (100 metric tons) to low Earth orbit, according to its SpaceX specifications page — is the breakthrough that will make ambitious feats such as Mars settlement economically feasible. And Mars settlement is Musk's driving ambition; he has repeatedly said that he founded SpaceX in 2002 primarily to help humanity become a multiplanet species.
SpaceX is iterating toward the final Starship spacecraft via a series of increasingly complex prototypes. For example, the first Starships to get off the ground were single-engine vehicles that flew about 500 feet (150 m) high. SN8, SN9 and SN10 all sported three Raptors, as well as forward and rear flaps for aerodynamic control, so they flew much higher.
SN10 put those flaps to use today as it soared through the South Texas skies. The vehicle performed a number of precise in-flight maneuvers, including a sustained hover at the 6.2-mile maximum altitude, a horizontal descent and a dramatic "landing flip" to get itself vertical in time for touchdown.
All of that happened a bit later in the day than SpaceX had planned. SN10 was originally scheduled to launch at 3:14 p.m. EST (1814 GMT) today, but that attempt was aborted just after engine ignition when the spacecraft's computer sensed something anomalous. The abort was caused by a "slightly conservative high thrust limit," Musk said via Twitter this afternoon. SpaceX soon increased that limit and got SN10 ready to fly just three hours later.
We'll see many more test flights in the weeks and months ahead, for SpaceX is already building multiple SN10 successors, as well as the first Super Heavy prototype. Musk has said that the company aims to get a Starship prototype to orbit this year, and he expects the final spaceflight system to be flying people regularly by 2023.
SpaceX already has an operational Starship flight targeted to launch that year — the "dearMoon" mission booked by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa. Maezawa is looking for crewmembers to join him on that six-day journey around the moon, so throw your hat in the ring if you're interested.
Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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2 of the six landing legs failed to deploy according to analysts viewing the landing. SN 10 was leaning to one side and leaking methane from a damaged line or rocket engine.
I have no idea why Musk is so obsessed with a vertical landing because it is and ever will be uneconomical compared to the alternatives.
The entire concept is to move away from a delta wing platform like the shuttle. There’s a lot of benefits to landing this way. And a lot of risk too.
Horizontal landing takes wings and a thick atmosphere. You cannot land on Mars or the moon with wings you must use propulsive landings. Starship is being designed to go to Mars and the moon as well they have no choice but to land with thrust. The most efficient use of mass is to use your main engines to land with and not carry dedicated landing engines hence the flip back to vertical and landing backwards on the main engines.
No, you’ve got it backwards. This is actually the second-stage to orbit rocket that will sit atop a much bigger booster. This has only three rocket engines now with potential later for six. The booster will have 36(?).
This stage is only as tall as a sixteen story building, but the booster will be, by itself, as tall as a thirty story building. It will also be reusable and either land on its tail end as SpaceX’s current smaller boosters do now, or it will be caught by its landing gantry on its steering winglets just before it touches ground to save the complexity and weight of landing legs.
This one they’re testing launching and trying to tail-end land to destruction, will also be SpaceX’s lunar and Mars lander, capable of being refueling and taking off and being used multiple times. The Earth and Mars versions will have heat resistant belly and wing ceramic tiles for atmospheric re-entry. Unlike the every-tile-is-unique on the Space Shuttle system, the Starship uses a system where over 90% of the tiles are cookie-cutter identical, another 5% are also standard shaped, and only about 5% are limited shape or unique shapes, thus cutting costs of replacement of damaged tiles.
I have no inside info, but back in the Apollo days the rocks returned to earth showed minute elements not in our current periodic tables. I’m confident Musk knows this and will mine and process the moon for periodic elements to finance his Mars efforts.
I liked the angles of the camera plus the big explosion!
The explosion that happened some time later was quite asymmetric, blowing the bottom of the rocket out from under it, turning the rocket in the air. Also, numerous pieces of the rocket were blown in the same direction and flew a couple of hundred feet.
It's pretty clear that by the time the rocket's fuselage hit the ground for the last time it was virtually empty, because there essentially zero explosion or subsequent fire once the main tanks collapsed. I'm thinking that it was a failure of one of the shut-down engines, possibly as a result of a leak or an unclosed valve.
It's probable that some additional timely out-gassing would have helped.
It landed hard and bounced about ten feet. It crumpled its fold-down landing legs and was left leaning like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Structural failure in the landing was the proximal cause of the explosion after all three engines shut down completely. A crack in the 4mm stainless steel skin which doubles as the methane fuel tank developed, releasing fuel onto the hot rocket engines, we could see the methane outgassing from under the crunch base... not good... and mixed with atmospheric oxygen, not LOX which had yet to be breeched, but that explosion was enough to blow the ship off the ground, crack the upper LOX tank, and get a bigger BOOM!
The three engines are designed to be re-used... and in fact, they all three had been started two hours before the flight for one second, then shut down when the on-board computer decided one of them was slightly out of spec on the high side. ... too powerful. So SpaceX engineers told the computer it was ok to accept that spec, and restarted the count, resetting the clock after detanking LOX and Methane. They then went back through refueling and launched. Flight was fine... but landing was too hard, although far better than the last two attempts which resulted in rapid unexpected deconstruction (RUD), while this one had delayed RUD by about 7 minutes after getting down on the ground.
It is actually economical as SpaceX intends on rapidly refueling and relaunching these Starships, likely on the same day. Musk intends to get the cost of lifting one pound of payload to low-earth orbit to around $10 from its current $50,000.
In addition, to land a reusable spacecraft on the moon or Mars it needs to land on its tail, especially on the Moon.
SpaceX’s Falcon9 booster is already launching satellites into low-earth orbit and supplies and astronauts and cosmonauts to the International Space Station and then returning to earth and landing on their tails, then being re-used to launch another mission. The record for a single booster is now up to nine launches.
This has made using SpaceX the most economical contractor to launch satellites as they are not throwing away their hardware with each launch.
The rocket accomplished the hard parts of the landing which were returning to vertical after coming down a long way in the side position and landing on the pad. The failure was the little legs on the bottom didn’t deploy, that made the explosion happen. Next time the leg deal will work and SpaceX will have a complete success.
Not as much as Bezos’ Blue Origin does... ROTFLMAO!
That happened to me once and was not pretty.
I’ve still got one, but I’m missing the key to unlock it. What I do have is something most are missing... the red rubber pointed nose that tended to get lost over the years. Apparently only about 10% for sale on eBay or in antique shops still have that nose cone.
Obviously, the owner was using a non-Tesla, third-part, Chinese made car charger on it when it exploded. Must be.
I’d like to see a poll from women as to which design they like the most, Starship or Blue Origin.
They were warned about Capt. Kirk piloting the spaceship.
Scotty just fix the damn engines!
/s
Inother news, Buck Rogers made an epic come back as Alura was waiting patiently for him to land today.
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