Starship Super Heavy launched to test behemoth's hypersonic return

New Delhi,UPDATED: Jun 6, 2024 18:28 IST

In a dramatic launch from the coastal Starbase facility in Texas, SpaceX's towering Starship rocket roared into the skies once again on its fourth high-altitude test flight Wednesday morning.

The 395-foot-tall fully reusable launch vehicle consisted of the Super Heavy booster stage and Starship upper stage stacked together.

Around 2.5 minutes into the flight, the two elements separated as planned, with the booster re-orienting itself for a controlled offshore splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. The Super Heavy had a controlled hard landing in the Gulf of Mexico.

STARSHIP SUPER HEAVY LAUNCHED

Meanwhile, the Starship spacecraft continued its ascent, powered by its six Raptor engines. After shutting down and reaching an expected peak altitude, the vehicle performed a long atmospheric re-entry to rigorously test its newly upgraded heat shield tiles.

"The main goal of this mission is to get much deeper into the atmosphere during re-entry, ideally through max heating," SpaceX founder Elon Musk had said prior to launch. This extreme re-entry testing is a crucial step before Starship can attempt an orbital flight.

During the third test launch, while the booster successfully executed a "boost-back" burn to reverse course, it experienced an anomaly during the final landing burn, resulting in a hard impact with the ocean surface. However, SpaceX still considered the test largely successful based on the valuable data gathered.

The Starship upper stage continued transmitting video of its dramatic re-entry through a plasma sheath until ultimately breaking apart before splashdown in the Pacific, as expected for this test flight.

Despite the inability to recover either stage this time, SpaceX has already begun manufacturing improvements for the next Starship test vehicle, based on the rapid learning afforded by this program's unprecedented iterative flight campaign.

As the launch provider for Nasa's Artemis lunar lander, and with ambitions for interplanetary travel, each Starship test puts SpaceX one step closer to achieving its vision of fully reusable transportation to the Moon, Mars and beyond.

Nasa is closely watching Starship's progress, as the agency has selected the vehicle as the crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program aimed at returning humans to the Moon by 2026. Starship's immense lift capability could enable establishment of a permanent lunar base.

The company, however, suffered a setback when Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa announced the cancellation of his much-awaited "dearMoon" mission - a planned private flight around the moon aboard the SpaceX spacecraft.

The dearMoon team revealed the decision in a statement, citing the lack of a "clear schedule certainty in the near-term" as the primary reason behind Maezawa's "unavoidable" call to cancel the mission.