Launched by SpaceX. Sixth test flight of its Starship rocket on Tuesday, as the company looks to keep up the pace of development of the larger vehicle.
The rocket took off from SpaceX’s private “Starbase” facility near Brownsville, Texas. There are no people on board the starship flight.
The starship reached space and would travel halfway around Earth before re-entering the atmosphere and crashing into the Indian Ocean.
SpaceX’s goal was to return the rocket’s “superheavy” booster after it separated from the starship and land it on the arms of the company’s launch tower. But SpaceX said during its webcast that the booster didn’t clear its “commit criteria” required for a catch, so the booster fell into the Gulf of Mexico instead.
On November 19, 2024, SpaceX Starship departed Starbase near Boca Chica, Texas for the Starship Flight 6 test.
Chandan Khanna | AFP | Getty Images
As with each previous test flight, SpaceX aims to further advance development by testing additional starship capabilities, including engine restarts in space and testing its heat shield during re-entry into the atmosphere.
Additionally, the evening launch time means this will be the first time the starship splashdowns in daylight.
SpaceX usually has a cadre of VIPs to watch Starship launches, and with CEO Elon Musk’s close ties to President-elect Donald Trump, the sixth flight is no different. Trump is expected to attend Tuesday’s launch, as he did during his first administration to watch SpaceX’s first astronaut launch in Florida in 2020.
Pushing the envelope
SpaceX holds the first stage “Super Heavy” booster of its Starship rocket on October 13, 2024.
Sergio Flores | AFP | Getty Images
SpaceX has flown the complete Starship rocket system on six space flight tests since April 2023, at an ever-increasing cadence. Its previous launch featured last month. Dramatic first catch of rocket’s 20-story-tall booster.
After a successful fifth flight, the Federal Aviation Administration confirmed that SpaceX had been authorized to proceed with a sixth flight.
But, like its previous test flights, the fifth launch was not without incident. SpaceX management, in audio posted by Musk on social media after the launch, revealed that the Starship’s booster nearly missed catch due to a timing problem with one of the rocket’s subsystems.
“We were one second away from tripping and telling the rocket to stop and try to hit the ground next to the tower instead. [landing at] Tower — like, accidentally tell a healthy rocket not to try that catch,” an unidentified person told Musk in the audio.
SpaceX did not recapture the booster. The company said on its website that it has upgraded the hardware in the rocket’s booster to have better redundancy and better structural strength.
The Starship system is designed to be fully reusable and is intended to be a new way to fly cargo and people off Earth. The rocket is also critical to NASA’s plan to return astronauts to the Moon. SpaceX won a multibillion-dollar contract from the agency to use Starship as a crewed lunar lander as part of NASA’s Artemis moon program.
Starship is the longest and most powerful rocket ever built. Fully decked out on a superheavy booster, the starship is 397 feet long and nearly 30 feet in diameter.
The superheavy booster, which is 232 feet long, is what starts the rocket’s journey into space. At its base are 33 Raptor engines, which together produce 16.7 million pounds of thrust – more than double the 8.8 million pounds of thrust of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, which will launch for the first time in 2022.
The starship itself, at an altitude of 165 feet, has six Raptor engines – three for use in Earth’s atmosphere and three for operation in the vacuum of space.
The rocket is powered by liquid oxygen and liquid methane. The entire system requires more than 10 million pounds of propellant to launch.
