Dawn of a new era in spaceflight! SpaceX finally launches and successfully lands its futuristic Starship
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Chica, May 06: : "Try, try and try again until you succeed"! Giving justice to this phrase Elon Musk's Space X has taken a massive leap forward in Starship's development. After 4 unsuccessful attempts, Space X scripted history and successfully landed its Mars rocket prototype SN 15 on a landing pad after a quick test flight. And more interestingly, SpaceX achieved this phenomenon feat on their 19th anniversary. It was a really big moment for Elon Musk and his Company who have envisions of sending humans to Mars and the moon.
The starship SN15 lifted off from the SpaceX launch site in Boca Chica, Texas, at about 5.24 pm local time. The rocket then reached its planned maximum altitude of 10 kilometers (6 miles), and after it turned itself sideways in a “belly flop” maneuver and headed back to Earth before righting itself, reigniting its engines and touching down softly. The landing was marred only by a small fire at the bottom of the vehicle that was extinguished after a few minutes.
"We are down, the Starship has landed," SpaceX principal integration engineer John Insprucker said during live commentary for the flight.
Soon after it softly lands Elon Musk took social media account and shared his happiness saying, " Starship landing nominal!"
The Raptor engine is a reusable metal ox staged-combustion engine that powers the Starship launch system. It should be noted that all four previous prototypes SN8, SN9, SN10, and SN11 attempted to safely land after soaring a few miles into the air, however it ended with exploding.
The first two flight tests of Starship, SN8, and SN9, both crashes landed and exploded when they launched in December and February. The other was SN10, which landed in one piece in early March but blew up 10 minutes later. SN 11 too exploded in mid-flight after launch.
Starship
Similar to previous high-altitude flight tests of Starship prototypes, Starship prototypes stand at about 120 m\394 ft tall, and each one is powered by three Raptor rocket engines.
SpaceX conceived the Starship as a versatile, fully reusable craft that can carry 100 metric tons. Excluding a booster rocket that creates a two-stage system, Starship is 160 feet high with a 30-foot diameter, able to carry as many as 100 passengers.
Earlier this month, NASA awarded SpaceX a nearly $3 billion contract to build a lunar variation of Starship to carry astronauts to the moon’s surface for the agency’s Artemis missions.
Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has already booked tickets for himself and eight others for a week-long Starship flight around the moon in 2023. The group is set to become the spaceship's first passengers.
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