SpaceX Successfully caught Second time its super heavy booster. During Starship’s 7th test flight from Boca Chica, Texas, the Super Heavy landed in the “chopstick” arms of the launch tower, allowing it to hold the booster.
Despite the successful capture, SpaceX lost communication with the Starship spacecraft mounted atop the booster. “It successfully separated from the super heavy booster, but during that ascent phase, some of the engines shut down, and then shortly after that, we lost communication with the vehicle,” SpaceX’s Kate Tice said during the stream. “We’re assuming we’ve lost the ship.”
According to SpaceX“The starship experienced a rapid unscheduled assembly during its ascent,” but said teams are still going over the data to determine the cause.
Several people who said they were on the Turks and Caicos Islands said they saw the starship’s re-entry debris and posted videos Its on social media.
This version of the Starship features “major improvements in reliability and performance” this time around, making the vehicle slightly taller. According to SpaceX.
Along with a redesigned propulsion system and an improved flight computer, this flight will include “multiple metallic tile options, including an active cooling” and a “backup layer to protect against lost or damaged tiles” to test alternative materials. Features a new heat shield. Before the flight, SpaceX also said that on the Starship’s upper stage, “a significant number of tiles will be removed to stress-test weak areas across the vehicle,” but it is unknown if this was a factor in its destruction. was
The super heavy booster in this test was also the first to reuse a Raptor engine from a previous flight test.
At 403 feet tall, Starship is the largest launch vehicle ever built. It is made up of two parts: the Starship spacecraft, which is designed to carry crew and cargo into orbit, and the Super Heavy Booster, which comes with 33 SpaceX Raptor engines that propel the starship into space. helps Both the starship spacecraft and its super heavy booster are reusable.
During its seventh test flight, the starship was to deploy 10 Starlink “simulators” for the first time. These artificial satellites are the same size and weight as Starlink’s original internet satellites, but they were not supposed to stay in space. Instead, they would have a “suborbital trajectory similar to a starship” and “die on entry.”
Update, January 16: Noted flight results and added video of wreckage over Turks and Caicos.
