There have been so many rocket launches from Elon Musk’s company in recent years that it’s hard to be surprised by them, but this SpaceX brainchild is special. Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever launched into space. According to the company, it is this rocket that can become the main vehicle for American astronauts in the exploration of the Moon, Mars, and “even further”.
The rocket consists of two parts – the Super Heavy upper stage and the Starship spacecraft. The numbers speak for themselves. Starting weight – 5,000 tons. Height – 120 meters, of which about 50 meters fall on the ship located in the upper part. Diameter – 9 meters. The first stage has 33 Raptor engines, the second 6 engines. According to the flight plan, the rocket is capable of delivering from 150 tons of cargo in near-Earth orbit in reusable mode up to 250 tons in one. SpaceX says the spacecraft is capable of not only carrying building materials to establish bases on the moon, but also accommodating up to 100 people on a flight to Mars.
According to today’s flight plan, approximately three minutes after departure, the first stage will undock and crash into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The ship will continue to rev up on its engines, complete an incomplete orbit around Earth, and about an hour and a half after departure, it will crash land in the Hawaiian Islands area. As SpaceX expects, it will happen “with an explosion.” But in the future, the two floors of the ship should be used as reusable floors. Musk expects it to be possible to successfully return both stages to the field in a few years.
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p class=””>The Starship has been tested many times, and not without failures. It crashed four times before finally flying into the stratosphere in 2021, followed by an impressive vertical landing. As for the first step, today’s flight is the first.
Musk himself had previously said the main purpose of the test was to send the rocket on some sort of long flight: “As long as we don’t destroy the spaceport.”
The class of super heavy rockets is a special weight category in which ready-made options fit on the fingers of one hand. Among the platforms already in flight, the Falcon Heavy (from the same SpaceX), as well as Boeing’s long-lasting SLS rocket, launched by NASA at the end of 2022, fall into this class with a certain draw. At the same time, both are significantly inferior to the giant ship in terms of carrying capacity, both in terms of launch weight and engine thrust. And both could exit the market if Starship is successful.
SpaceX has already said that Starship will completely replace the Falcon Heavy. As for the SLS, although its first flight late last year was a success, many experts in the United States believe that the future of this expendable rocket is vague due to the high cost of launches. The reusable concept behind Starship is, at least in theory, designed to reduce the cost of putting payloads into orbit.
So, although in the first flight to the moon of this century, American astronauts will go on an SLS rocket with the Orion spacecraft, it is Starship that should be used as a shuttle to land people on the surface of the earth satellite and bring them back to the Orion spacecraft in lunar orbit, which will already bring them back.
But projects for using Starship are not limited to human spaceflight. SpaceX is going to use this platform to send satellites into low Earth orbit and is also positioning it as a super-fast (less than an hour) system to deliver large payloads to different regions of the Earth.
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