Return to the starship (2024)

FAQs

Will Starship survive reentry? ›

June 6 (Reuters) - SpaceX's Starship rocket survived a fiery, hypersonic return from space and achieved a breakthrough landing demonstration in the Indian Ocean on Thursday, completing a full test mission around the globe on the rocket's fourth try.

SpaceX's Starship rocket has completed its first-ever full flight, after surviving re-entry in a breakthrough for the prototype system that may one day send people to Mars.

With the changes implemented, SpaceX completed a launch dress rehearsal in May ahead of the next launch attempt. If the fourth flight test achieves its landing goals, the Starship will launch from Texas and splash down in the Indian Ocean.

SpaceX's Starship rocket has soft landing on Earth, despite loss of tiles.

SpaceX showed that both the Starship spacecraft and the rocket's first-stage, known as Super Heavy, can survive the fiery trip back through Earth's atmosphere and make a “soft” and controlled splash down.

SpaceX did not intend to recover any stages of the vehicle after IFT-4. They just splashed it down in the Gulf of Mexico for the Super Heavy booster and in the Indian Ocean for Starship itself.

As of 2024, Starship is in development with an iterative and incremental approach, involving test flights of prototype vehicles. As a successor to SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, Starship will perform a wide range of space missions.

Starship's Raptor engines burn approximately 40,000 pounds of fuel per second to reach 17 million pounds of thrust. Nearby Texan residents described the blowback as resembling a “mini earthquake” at the time, with at least one business owner's store window shattering.

But the touchdown in the animation is different: It's a midair catch performed by the "chopstick" arms of the huge launch tower at Starbase, SpaceX's site in South Texas. And that is indeed what SpaceX plans to do on launches of the 400-foot-tall (122 meters) Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built.

The spacecraft is designed to transport both crew and cargo to a variety of destinations, including Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, and beyond. It is intended to enable long duration interplanetary flights for a crew of up to 100 people.

How much of SpaceX does Elon Musk own? ›

And Deutsche Bank analyst Emmanuel Rosner wrote Wednesday after meeting with Tesla management in Munich that third-quarter profit margins might be a little worse than expected. Musk isn't the sole owner of SpaceX. He owns 42% and had almost 79% of its voting power as of March, the Journal reported.

Moon Missions

Developing a Moon base to support future space exploration requires the transport of large amounts of cargo to the surface of the Moon. Starship is designed to carry these building blocks, further enabling research and human spaceflight development.

The cause of this failure was traced to blockage in a filter where liquid oxygen flows into the Raptor engines. Notably, a similar problem occurred during the second test flight of Starship in November 2023. SpaceX says it implemented "hardware changes" to address this blockage issue for the third test flight.

SpaceX has stated its ambition to facilitate the colonization of Mars via the development and mass manufacturing of the Starship launch vehicle. The company states that this is necessary for the long-term survival of the human species and for the expansion of the scope of human consciousness.

Starship will land humans on the lunar surface for the first time in more than 50 years under NASA's Artemis missions.

During descent through the Earth's atmosphere, the space station would burn, break up, and vaporize into fragments of various sizes. Some fragments would likely survive the thermal stresses of re-entry.

Once an operation is completed, the satellite will receive instructions from the ground while it has remaining the power. It will enter the atmosphere and burn up or move from its orbit without disturbing other satellites in operation.

There's no such thing as a standstill, period. An object can only be at a standstill relative to some specific other object. Remember, motion is relative. With respect to itself, a spacecraft is always at a standstill when it is not using its engines to accelerate.