SpaceX has contracts with NASA worth about $ 4 billion to design and develop a Moon Lander based on the Starship design. The Starship Lander is a central piece of Nasa’s architecture for the Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the lunar surface. For Starship to fly to the moon, SpaceX must refill it with super-cold propellants in a low earth orbit, something no one has done on this scale before.
Musk considers Starship as the interplanetary backbone for transport transport and people to Mars, one of its most consistent long -term goals. It also requires the fuel of the track to orbit. Musk recently suggested that SpaceX be ready to demonstrate in 2026, a year later than the 2025 goal of the Nasa officials discussed in December.
Starship will also launch SpaceX’s next generation of Starlink Internet satellites. Prior to the launch of Thursday, Ground Crews loaded four Starlink-Mock-ups into Starship’s Payload Bay to test the Rocket’s implementation mechanism. Officials were eager to judge the performance of Starship Block 2’s Heat Shield before being committed to restoring the ship intact (as SpaceX already does with the Super Heavy Booster) on a future mission. But the premature end of this test flight means that the objectives have to wait.
SpaceX oversees the starship using an iterative development cycle. Engineers come with new designs, test them quickly and then contain lessons learned in the next rocket. It is not surprising to see how a few rockets blow up using this spiral development cycle. But back-to-back missions, especially with so many similarities, may indicate a more fundamental matter.
The flight plan that is going on Thursday’s mission requested that Starship be sent halfway around the world from Texas, which amounts to a controlled reaffirmation of the Indian Ocean before splashing northwest of Australia.
The test flight was supposed to be a transition from the previous Starship flight on January 16, when the top stage of the rocket itself known as Starship or Ship for fires fueled by leaking drives in the engine. Engineers determined that the most likely cause of the propellant was a harmonic response several times stronger than predicted, suggesting that the vibrations during the ship’s climb were in space in resonance with the natural frequency of the vehicle. This would have strengthened the vibrations besides the levels that engineers expected.
