SpaceX launches its mega Starship rocket and mechanical arms will try to catch it at landing this time – The Globe and Mail

Boca Chica, Texas – SpaceX launched its giant Starship rocket early Tuesday morning, but the craft exploded minutes after liftoff as it attempted to separate from its booster. The explosion was not unexpected as this was a test flight, however, it did result in a large fire.

The company announced on Tuesday that it would conduct a “static fire” test of its Starship spacecraft engines before making another launch attempt.

SpaceX plans to use Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, to deliver astronauts and cargo to the Moon and Mars. The first launch, from SpaceX’s facility near the southern tip of Texas, came nearly four years after Elon Musk first unveiled his ambitions for the spacecraft.

This launch was the culmination of a yearslong engineering and design process involving thousands of employees, all geared towards the eventual goal of reusable spacecraft that can make trips back and forth between Earth and Mars.

Starship’s booster – technically referred to as Super Heavy, as it’s a highly powerful version of the rocket – is one of the biggest and most powerful ever built. After separating from the spaceship, Super Heavy was supposed to flip over and make a soft landing on a giant, remote-controlled platform that floats in the ocean a few miles from the launch site.

Meanwhile, Starship, the part that will eventually carry astronauts and cargo, continued to its intended target altitude. It was scheduled to complete a quick journey around the Earth and then, according to SpaceX’s website, it was “intended to perform a landing burn on the coastline about 10 kilometers east of the launch pad.”

During the first launch attempt of a Starship on April 20, the massive vehicle separated from the booster after its ascent began. Starship then ascended as planned to reach a high enough altitude to deploy its fins, which then would have allowed it to enter Earth’s atmosphere.

However, that first test flight resulted in a catastrophic event that, in SpaceX terminology, is called a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” – or, more plainly, the spaceship blew up in mid-air after a failed engine restart and was destroyed. SpaceX then initiated its investigative procedure, after which it chose to attempt a second launch.

For the Tuesday launch attempt, SpaceX also attempted something unprecedented for its launch platform – it intended to attempt a first-time maneuver with two mechanical arms that would grab the Starship’s booster, Super Heavy, as it landed back on the launch site platform. In theory, if it were successful, that technology would eliminate the need for costly repairs after launches. If SpaceX succeeds in perfecting it, then it will usher in a new age of space travel, said John Logsdon, a professor emeritus at the George Washington University Space Policy Institute and former director of the institute. He said it will usher in “a period of frequent, routine launches.”

In essence, the landing of the booster will be a monumental feat for space travel: a system where a launch vehicle returns to Earth from a journey beyond our planet and gracefully touches down onto its platform as planned, a spectacle which Musk’s company says will “revolutionize space transportation.”

A NASA astronaut and former administrator, Charles Bolden Jr., has likened SpaceX’s endeavor to the time Apollo astronauts first orbited the Moon. “They will learn a great deal and they will build on those lessons,” Bolden said in a statement released through his consultancy.

SpaceX has said its Starship is its most critical program to date. That’s why the launch – even after its failure – was deemed a valuable step. The next several tests, once successful, will lead up to NASA’s Artemis III mission, scheduled for 2025 or 2026. This is when the first astronauts will land on the Moon since the Apollo missions decades ago.

Even before that, NASA expects Starship will begin carrying cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station within the next few years.

“SpaceX continues to take the lead in moving space exploration forward with innovation,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement released earlier this year. The agency signed a contract with SpaceX to help NASA make that long-delayed journey to the lunar surface happen.