Spacex, Elon Musk’s company, is about to launch its Starship rocket for the tenth time from Texas on Sunday to reach several long -persecuted development milestones and not achieved because the previous evidence ended in premature failures.
The Super Heavy rocket, 70 meters high, and its upper half Starship, 52 meters19:30 crazy hour (2330 GMT). MUSK is expected to provide updated information about the progress of Starship’s development before launch.
The development of the new generation rocket of Spacex, the center of the powerful company launching business in the future and Musk ambitions on Marshe has faced repeated setbacks this year, since NASA aspires to use the rocket as soon as in 2027 for its first moving manned from the Apollo program.
The future of the Spacex Starlink Satellite Internet business, an important source of income for the company that has been deployed by Falcon 9, is also linked to Starship’s success. Musk wants to use Starship’s greatest support force to put larger Starlink satellites in orbit, designed to expand the bandwidth of the constellation.
This year, two failures in the Starship tests at the beginning of the flight, another space failure in its ninth flight and a massive explosion in the test bank in June that sent debris flying to Mexican territory have tested the Spacex development approach. Even so, the company has continued to quickly produce new ships for test flights in its extensive Starbase production facilities.
These setbacks highlight the technical complexity of the Starship, endowed with many more capacities, such as a greater thrust, a potentially more resistant thermal shield and stronger management fins, Crucial to nail its atmospheric reentry, key characteristics for the rapid reuse of the starship through which Musk has been fighting for so long.
Towards Sunday, the system will take off from Texas before its upper Starship stage is separated from the Super Heavy propeller to tens of kilometers of altitude. The Super Heavy, which in previous tests returned to its launch platform in giant mechanical arms, will land in the Gulf of Mexico to test a reserve motor configuration.
Meanwhile, the Starship will briefly turn on its own engines to launch into space, where it will try to release its first batch of simulated Starlink satellites and turn on an engine on a suborbital trajectory around the planet.
About an hour after the mission started, the ship will go to an atmospheric reentry on the Indian Ocean, a crucial flight phase that will test various prototypes of thermal armor plates and motor ailerons designed to support an abrasive heat flood that has largely destroyed the exterior of the rocket during previous tests.
“Starship’s reentry profile is designed to intentionally force the structural limits of the rear fins of the upper stage at the point of maximum dynamic input pressure”Spacex explained on its website.
