On Nov. 18, SpaceX did a second flight test of Starship. The vehicle stayed in the air for more than eight minutes before intentionally exploding over the Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX said that “this second flight will provide invaluable data to continue rapidly developing Starship.”
Starship, a spacecraft meant to send humans to Mars, consists of two parts: The booster, called Super Heavy, and the spacecraft (also referred to as just Starship). The spacecraft is intended to be reusable, and SpaceX claims that it “is capable of carrying crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, and beyond. Starship is also capable of point-to-point transport on Earth, enabling travel to anywhere in the world in one hour or less.” It has a payload of 100 to 150 metric tons (in a way such that it is reusable — it can be used in an expendable fashion to carry up to 250 metric tons). Starship’s booster is apparently the most powerful ever created in terms of thrust. Starship is fueled by oxygen and methane, and, on its hypothetical trip to Mars, would use “tanker vehicles (essentially the Starship spacecraft minus the windows) to refill the Starship spacecraft in low-Earth orbit.”
SpaceX had been planning to build a rocket capable of going to Mars from essentially the beginning. The Starship project got its current name in 2018. It had previously been called the Big Falcon Rocket. In accordance with its name, Elon Musk said that later versions of the rocket would travel to other solar systems. Starbase was built in Boca Chica, Texas — ground was broken at the site in 2014, and it was designated as an exclusive launch site for Starship in 2018. Various prototypes of the rocket were launched.
The first integrated flight test happened at Starbase on Apr. 20. The rocket launched, but stage separation failed, and Starship exploded after multiple engine failures four minutes into the flight. This was not unexpected, as it was only a test. The rocket ultimately reached a height of 24 miles. SpaceX was required to do a mishap evaluation, after which the FAA produced a list of 63 corrective actions for SpaceX to take. The Fish and Wildlife Service also conducted an investigation of how the launch had affected various sorts of local wild animals, to which they did not find a major effect.
After SpaceX had made engineering corrections based on the results of the last test, and after the federal government had completed their investigations, the second integrated flight test happened on Nov. 18. (The launch had been postponed one day because a grid fin actuator needed to be replaced.) This time, the rocket successfully completed stage separation (after which the first stage exploded). The second stage ultimately reached a height of about 90 kilometers. Contact was lost after about eight minutes, and so at that point, the second stage self-destructed in a controlled fashion.
Since then, there have been six Starlink launches, adding to SpaceX’s vast network of internet-providing satellites, which is famously used to Ukraine’s benefit in the Ukraine-Russia War.
On Dec. 11, SpaceX will launch the USSF-52 to orbit with Falcon Heavy at Cape Canaveral. This will be a launch of Space Force’s X-37B Launch Vehicle, which is intended to “experiment with future space domain awareness technologies,” though what this entails is not fully described. It will also involve a NASA experiment on the effects of exposing plant seeds to space radiation. SpaceX continues its high rate of launches for both civilian and military purposes.
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