Elon Musk Announces SpaceX Targeting March for First Orbital Test of Starship Rocket
SpaceX chief Elon Musk says the company’s next-generation Super Heavy rocket and Starship spacecraft are on track for a March launch.
“If the remaining tests go well, we will attempt a Starship launch next month,” Musk said called in a tweet a few days ago, pursue a little later with: “Success is far from certain, but the excitement is guaranteed.”
The test involves launching the vehicle — collectively known as the Starship — from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas, for its first orbital flight. While future missions call for both the rocket and spacecraft to land at the end of a flight for use on further missions, both sections will land in the Pacific Ocean for the upcoming test.
The excitement Musk is talking about will come not only from the most powerful rocket ever being launched into space for the first time, but also because the mission will mark a major step forward for NASA as it attempts to create one to establish a habitable base on the moon and, possibly in the 2030s, to send the first humans to Mars as part of the Artemis program.
But as Musk also noted, testing a new rocket for the first time is a big challenge. While failure at launch or in-flight would be a setback for SpaceX, such missions are designed to deliver data and surface issues, giving engineers the opportunity to perfect the system ahead of a cargo mission to the Moon.
In preparation for the test flight, the team successfully completed an important pre-launch procedure about two weeks ago when they filled the tanks with fuel and performed a mock countdown, known in the industry as a ‘wet dress rehearsal’.
Additional pre-launch procedures include a static fire test of the Super Heavy’s 33 Raptor 2 engines. It’s these thrusters that will collectively generate about 17,000 pounds of thrust at launch, nearly double that of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, which became the most powerful rocket ever launched last November when it launched the Orion spacecraft on a flight around the moon as part of the first Artemis mission.
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Source: www.digitaltrends.com
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