The enormous Starship roared off a launch pad in southern Texas today and then exploded before it reached space, ending the first major test flight of the largest rocket ever built
“We’re really excited about the prospect of enabling science with Starship,” Julianna Scheiman, SpaceX’s director of NASA satellite missions, said on 18 April at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado.Starship, which looks like a giant metal cylinder, sits 120 metres tall when stacked atop its Super Heavy rocket booster. The craft can carry up to 150 tonnes of equipment into space and is designed as a fully reusable transportation system.
“We have always been constrained in space flight by mass, volume and cost,” says Jennifer Heldmann, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “And all of those constraints are basically lifted with Starship.” NASA’s fleet of space shuttles, which flew 135 times to low Earth orbit and back between 1981 and 2011, was also supposed to provide frequent access to space. But NASA eventually retired the shuttle in favour of developing the more powerful SLS to travel farther away from Earth.
SpaceX has already developed smaller and partially reusable rockets, such as its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy series, that routinely launch satellites for governments, companies and other customers. It envisions using Starship to deploy even larger objects, such as the next generation of its Starlink communications satellites, which some astronomers haveIt’s too soon to tell whether SpaceX can fulfil its promises of flying Starship regularly and cheaply, Forczyk says.
Still, developing any new rocket is challenging, as today’s flight showed. SpaceX has a number of other Starships built and will likely test another one in the near future. “We could see a lot of significant progress this year,” Forczyk says. “Or not.”
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