The seventh test flight of SpaceX Starship had serious ups and falls.
16 January Company has launched a starship mega-rocket, By sending a reusable vehicle tall 403,5 feet (123 meters) from his Starbase base in South Texas O 17:37. EAST (2237 GMT; 16:37 local time).
One of the goals of this ambitious test flight was, To catch a giant rocket launch accelerator Starship rocket, known as Super Heavy, On the Starbase Starting Tower, Using a "food sticks" device. SpaceX first performed it on Starship Flight 5 in October — and did it again.
Accelerator with 33 engines gently pressed against the arms of the tower about seven minutes after launch today, demonstrating a recovery strategy, which SpaceX intends to use as a Super Heavy, and for the Starship.
But not everything went according to plan. SpaceX lost contact with the spacecraft after approx 8,5 minutes of flight, apparently, after that, as the ship experienced some anomaly.
All six Raptor Starship Raptor engines worked while lifting a degree, “but as the ship approached the end of the ascent phase, Telemetry showed, that engines are disabled, And since then the connection with the ship has lost ”, said Dan Huot, SpaceX Communications Communications Representative, During the web startup of the company.
Dan and his colleague-wedding web broadcast Kate Tais later confirmed, that the ship is lost. Currently the reasons are not clear.
The ship had to fly most of the way around the world, and then gently fall into the Indian Ocean off the west coast of Australia about through 66 minutes after the start, as it had been during the three previous Starship launches.
Seventh Flight also had to present some program updates: about through 17,5 minutes after the start, the upper stage had to deploy 10 simulated satellites, similar in size and weight to the new version of SpaceX's Starlink broadband spacecraft.
Deployment would be a useful practice. SpaceX is counting, that Starship will complete the creation of its Starlink group, which currently consists of almost 7000 satellites in low Earth orbit, but may ultimately include over 40 000 devices.
Satellite layouts were to follow the suborbital trajectory of the ship, eventually falling into the Indian Ocean, writes SpaceX in the Flight mission statement 7.
As noted by Huot and Theis, today's ship was a new iteration, which had a set of updates and modifications.
"The vehicle's forward flaps have been reduced in size and moved to the end of the ship and away from the heat shield, which significantly reduced the effect of heating when re -entry, while simplifying the basic mechanisms and protective coating", - wrote SpaceX in the mission description.
"Reconstruction of the power plant, including an increase in 25% fuel volume, vacuum casing of power lines, a new fuel supply system for the Raptor vacuum engines and an improved powerplant avionics module, which controls the vehicle's valves and reading sensors, all this adds additional advantages to the vehicle to carry out longer missions", - added in the company.
According to SpaceX, these modifications added the length of the vehicle by approx 6,5 feet.
Super Heavy rocket, was largely the same, like recent accelerators, but had one new feature. For the first time, Super Heavy reused equipment — the Raptor engine, who also flew in the 5th flight.
The previous six test flights of the Starship rocket took place in April and November 2023 year and in March, June, October and November last year. SpaceX also aimed to catch the Super Heavy during the 6th flight, but a communication problem with the launch tower prevented this attempt, and the launch vehicle was diverted to land in the Gulf of Mexico.
SpaceX is developing Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket, ever created, To help humanity to populate the moon and Mars and the company seeks to make serious progress in its creation in 2025 year.