SpaceX Starship rocket launches after last two blew up

[Pelican Press 0]

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

SpaceX Starship rocket launches after last two blew up

Starship, the futuristic SpaceX rocket vehicle on which Elon Musk’s ambitions for multi planetary travel are riding, has roared into the sky on its ninth uncrewed test launch, aiming for a clean flight after the last two attempts ended in explosive failure.

The two-stage spacecraft, consisting of the Starship vessel mounted atop a towering SpaceX Super Heavy rocket booster, blasted off from the company’s Starbase launch site on the Gulf Coast of Texas near Brownsville.

A live SpaceX webcast of the lift-off showed the rocketship rising from the launch tower into the early evening sky as the Super Heavy’s cluster of powerful Raptor engines thundered to life in a ball of flame and billowing clouds of exhaust and water vapour.

SpaceX launched the Starship system with a previously flown Super Heavy booster for the first time, aiming to achieve a key demonstration of its reusability. The 71-metre first-stage booster will not attempt a return to its launch pad but target the Gulf of Mexico for a controlled splashdown.

Federal regulators granted SpaceX a license for Starship’s latest flight attempt just four days ago, capping a mishap investigation that had grounded Starship for nearly two months.

Its last two test flights – in January and March – were cut short moments after lift-off as the vehicle blew to pieces on its ascent, raining debris over parts of the Caribbean and disrupting scores of commercial airline flights in the region.

The Federal Aviation Administration expanded debris hazard zones around the ascent path for Tuesday’s launch, the ninth full test flight of the Starship campaign.

The previous back-to-back failures occurred in early test-flight phases that SpaceX had easily achieved before, dealing a striking setback to a program that Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur who founded the rocket company in 2002, had sought to accelerate this year.

Musk, the world’s wealthiest individual and a key supporter of US President Donald Trump, was especially eager for a success after vowing in recent days to refocus his attention on his various business ventures, including SpaceX, following a tumultuous foray into national politics and his attempts at cutting government bureaucracy.

Musk is counting on Starship to fulfil his goal of producing a large, multipurpose next-generation spacecraft capable of sending people and cargo to the moon later this decade and ultimately flying to Mars.

Closer to home, Musk also sees Starship as eventually replacing the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as the workhorse in the company’s commercial launch business, which already lofts most of the world’s satellites and other payloads to low-Earth orbit.

Musk was scheduled to deliver an update on his space exploration ambitions in a speech from Starbase following the test flight, to be livestreamed under the banner slogan The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary.

He was expected to offer new timelines and development plans for sending cargo and potentially astronauts aboard Starship on voyages to Mars, a tantalising but still-distant future destination for human spaceflight that poses major technical hurdles for SpaceX and NASA.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

#SpaceX #Starship #rocket #launches #blew

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

For verified travel tips and real support, visit: https://hopzone.eu/