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SpaceX’s Starship flew into space and back, but suffered visible damage as it crashed to Earth.
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The rocket’s fin began to break off in mid-autumn and the camera lens cracked.
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Starship’s splashdown was a huge step towards reusability, and Elon Musk claimed victory.
SpaceX’s Starship megarocket scored a major victory Thursday on the road to Elon Musk’s plans to settle Mars — but not without some battle scars.
The rocket ship flew into space for the first time and returned to Earth to splash down in the Indian Ocean with its engines running and communications with mission control intact.
But the spacecraft was visibly falling apart as it screamed through Earth’s atmosphere on SpaceX’s livestream.
Viewers had a limited view of the ship itself, but the onboard camera was conveniently placed just in front of the fin, which began to break off about halfway back to Earth.
Soon the spacecraft began spewing so much debris that it caused the camera to blur. According to a SpaceX commentator on the livestream, the lens eventually cracked under extreme conditions.
Still, Starship at least partially accomplished one of its biggest goals for this flight: to practice landing.
SpaceX operators confirmed that Starship turned on its engines as it approached water in an attempt to turn itself upright and make a soft landing.
You can watch this entire challenging process in SpaceX’s live broadcast, starting at 1 hour and 25 minutes:
Musk declared victory by sharing on
Given the damage to the spacecraft and the poor visibility in the camera footage, it was not immediately clear how smooth the landing actually was.
The full extent of the damage to Starship was not immediately clear and may never be, as SpaceX does not plan to recover the ship from the ocean.
Falling back to Earth is extremely intense
The disintegration was a sight to behold, but not a surprise. This was a test flight, after all, and SpaceX only guaranteed excitement.
Space flight is hard, but the journey back to Earth is pure hell.
A “re-entering” spacecraft is screeching toward Earth at many times the speed of sound — 27,000 mph for Starship, according to SpaceX — hurtling into an increasingly thick atmosphere and creating so much friction that it’s superheated around its belly plasma forms and breaks the spaceship. At temperatures up to 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit.
This plasma also appeared on live broadcast.
That’s why any spacecraft designed to return to Earth must have a good heat shield. For the Starship, that’s its hub, made up of 18,000 hexagon-shaped ceramic tiles, which Musk hinted is still a work in progress.
“A super-reliable, lightweight, reusable heat shield is the biggest remaining technical challenge for Starship,” Musk said. Wrote In May at X.
He reiterated after Thursday’s flight that the heat shield was the “toughest remaining problem.”
Although this was the launch system’s fourth test flight, it was only Starship’s second trip into space.
For the first time in March, SpaceX declared the vehicle “lost” after communication was lost during landing. This likely means it broke apart or exploded due to the stress of re-entering Earth’s atmosphere.
The Starship-Super Heavy launch system, consisting of a lower stage Super Heavy booster and an upper stage Starship vehicle, promises to be the largest, most powerful and first fully reusable orbital rocket on Earth.
Starship’s landing was a major step towards reusability. The Super Heavy booster also successfully made its first soft water landing after separating from Starship on Thursday.
He started the booster engines and raised himself upright to land in the Gulf of Mexico.
Eventually, SpaceX plans to land both stages of the rocket on solid ground to quickly regenerate and fly again another day.
If the Starship-Super Heavy lives up to its hype, it could reduce the cost of spaceflight by a factor of ten, enable high-speed point-to-point transportation on Earth, and yes, even bring the first colonists to Mars.
Read the original article on Business Insider