After launching more than 100 small payloads from California on Tuesday. two commercial lunar landers SpaceX prepared its giant superspacecraft early Wednesday morning from Florida, both atop a Falcon 9 rocket, for an earth-shaking launch from the Texas Gulf Coast to begin the program’s seventh test flight. Ta.
But bad weather led the California rocket maker to postpone the high-profile flight to Thursday, following NASA’s spacewalk outside the International Space Station and the maiden flight of Jeff Bezos’ New Glenn rocket. .
space x
New Glenn is scheduled for a weather-delayed launch from Pad 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 1 a.m. ET, the start of a three-hour launch window.
Six hours later, Space Station astronaut Nick Haag and Starliner pilot Sunita Williams were outside NASA’s experimental facility for six and a half hours starting around 8 a.m. to perform various maintenance and upgrade tasks. The spacecraft is scheduled to carry out several extravehicular activities.
The supersized spacecraft will now be ready for launch from SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas, manufacturing and flight test facility at 5 p.m. ET, weather permitting.
Super Heavy Starship is the most powerful rocket ever built, using 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines to generate an impressive 16 million pounds of thrust at launch. The New Glenn rocket, made by Bezos’ space company Blue Origin, is less powerful but will compete directly with SpaceX’s industry-dominant Falcon 9 family of rockets.
Like the Falcon 9’s first stage, the New Glenn booster is reusable, and Blue Origin will attempt to retrieve the first stage by landing on an offshore lander. The rocket’s upper stage will enter orbit, where flight controllers will conduct a series of tests. Additional flights are planned for later this year.
The super-sized spacecraft has more ambitious plans to match its massive size.
As with the two recent test flights, the first stage will push Starship’s upper stage out of the dense lower atmosphere before falling back to the launch site for recovery. Meanwhile, Starship continues its spaceflight powered by its own six Raptor engines.
blue origin
In these first test flights, Starship will not attempt to reach orbit. Instead, they will fly halfway around the planet, descend belly-first in hellish atmospheric friction, then nose up and rocket-powered tail-first for a splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
On three successive flights, SpaceX said its superheavy first stage propelled Starship out of the lower atmosphere before getting stuck mid-descent using a giant mechanical arm known as a chopstick attached to the launch tower. An attempt was planned to “catch” the super-heavy first stage. .
of first such catch Last October’s event was a success and saw a spectacular sight as thousands of residents and tourists cheered. However, the super heavy used is Next flight is in 1 month It was diverted to splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico because the launch damaged sensors on the tower needed to guide the descending booster into position.
Now, new sensors have more robust shields to eliminate such damage, and SpaceX engineers are confident that they will be able to fire superheavy boosters with the same regularity they demonstrated on the company’s flagship Falcon 9 rocket. I am optimistic that it will be recovered soon.
But the bulk of the upgrades being tested Thursday are being built into what SpaceX calls its “new generation” Starship. Multiple system changes were made to improve performance and test systems required for final stage recovery.
“This new year will be a transformational year for Starship,” SpaceX said on its website, “as we repeatedly repurpose entire systems online and deliver humans and cargo to Earth orbit. The goal is to fly increasingly ambitious missions.” moon and mars. ”
more