On June 5, SpaceX’s huge Starship rocket could take to the sky for the fourth time. The main goal is to test the second stage’s reusable heat shield as the vehicle tries to safely return the atmosphere for the first time.
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, wrote on his social media site X, “There are many tough problems to solve with this vehicle. But the biggest problem is making a reusable orbital return heat shield, which has never been done before.”
He said earlier this month that the main goal of the next Starship test was to “get through max reentry heating,” which is what his post says.
That means the new heat shield for the second stage, which is made up of about 18,000 clay hexagonal tiles, will be put to the test. The tiles are meant to keep the second stage, which is also known as Starship, safe from the very high temperatures it will experience when it reenters Earth’s atmosphere. Musk said that the general weakness of the system is one of the biggest problems: “we are not resilient to loss of a single tile in most places.” That means that one broken or wrong tile could cause a disaster.
Musk said in his post that making it through return is only one piece of the puzzle. For the high-performance heat shield tiles, the company will also have to set up a “entirely new supply chain” and make a lot of them.
If they could figure it out, they’d be closer to the holy grail of launch vehicles: being able to use the same vehicle over and over again. SpaceX made a lot of progress in reusability with its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which has already flown 56 times this year. The company can collect the booster, but the second stage burns up in orbit. SpaceX hopes to cut costs to a tiny fraction of what they are now by reusing both stages of the rocket. This will allow them to send many orders of magnitude more mass into space in a single launch. It costs $6,000 per kilogram for SpaceX’s Transporter rideshare flights.
The company will show that they can bring Starship back to Earth through a controlled approach and a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean if everything goes as planned. SpaceX also wants to return the launch, which is called Super Heavy, by splashing down in the ocean. The biggest and most powerful launch system ever built will be one step closer to being ready to take goods and eventually people to orbit around the Earth and beyond.
The fourth test flight of Starship into orbit began in April of last year and will happen again with the next launch. SpaceX needs to get a commercial launch license from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which is in charge of regulating commercial launch activities, before the launch can happen. The FAA is also in charge of looking into any rocket launches that go wrong, which is why it has been working closely with SpaceX on the Starship test program.
The last three launches of Starship have all gone wrong: the first two ended in fiery fires in the air, and the third ended with both Super Heavy and Starship likely breaking apart before hitting the ocean. But for SpaceX, which develops hardware in steps, each test was eventually successful because it gave engineers information about how the rocket worked in a real-world flight situation. And it’s true that each trip has gone farther than the last. On the third flight, as the vehicle rose, the engines stopped doing full-duration burns, and Starship finally reached orbit for the first time.
Also Read: Spacex Plans to Launch the Huge Starship for the Third Time Early Thursday Morning
SpaceX wants to eventually land both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship second stage at its launch site in southeast Texas. There, they can be quickly fixed up and sent back to the pad.
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