By Flynn Demapendan
The company SpaceX has successfully launched their latest test flight of Starship, which is the most powerful launch vehicle ever built. It could potentially be used to carry humans to the moon and Mars.
The launch system of the first Starship had an upper Starship spacecraft along with a rocket booster that is known as the Super Heavy. The rocket has 33 engines. 32 of them are lit during the launch.
The craft has soared and collected multiple milestones for the company during its test flight, most important of which is the survival of the capsule upon reentrance during a heat peak in the Earth’s atmosphere along with splashdown.
In the most recent liftoff for Starship Flight 5, the rocket booster, which was accompanied by an uncrewed Starship spacecraft, ignited around 8:25 a.m. For the first time, the demonstrated mission has added an attempt to move the rocket into a landing structure. The rocket had burned most of its fuel and had broken off from the upper Starship spacecraft.
Although the spacecraft kept flying on its own with the attached six onboard engines, it practiced a landing motion over the Indian Ocean. As a result, SpaceX is not expected to recover the part of the spacecraft that was lost in the ocean.
Essentially, SpaceX wants to use the capsule of Starship as a landing device that will carry NASA astronauts into the lunar surface in 2026. They also considered doing it around the same time as and as part of the Artemis III mission, and rounded up the mission to cost nearly $4 billion.
Although, if SpaceX were to do their mission alongside Artemis, the Starship would have to stay in orbit as close to Earth as possible. SpaceX would launch support vehicles to transport its fuel. Therefore, for the spacecraft to travel to the moon, it would take the company many refueling trips.
The successful flight of the Starship could allow the company to lean into more aspiring projects. SpaceX wants to figure out how they could refuel the spacecraft while it is placed in orbit.
With each milestone SpaceX achieves, the company one day wants to recover and refly the boosters and spacecraft for its future missions. Immediately after reusing the parts of the rocket, it is essential to the company’s goal to reduce the time and money of getting the cargo into the Earth’s orbit.
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