SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket could take flight for the fourth time on June 5, with the primary goal being to evaluate the second stage’s reusable heat shield as the vehicle attempts to safely re-enter the atmosphere for the first time times.
CEO Elon Musk said on his social media platform never been done before. »
His message echoes comments he made earlier this month when he noted that the main goal of the Starship’s upcoming test was to “max out the re-entry heater.”
This means that the second floor’s new heat shield, made of approximately 18,000 hexagonal ceramic tiles, will be put to the test. These tiles are designed to protect the second stage (also called Starship) from the extreme temperatures encountered during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. One of the biggest problems, Musk suggested, is the vulnerability of the system as a whole: “We’re not resilient to losing a single tile in most places,” he said. This means that just one damaged or faulty tile could lead to disaster.
As Musk noted in his article, surviving reentry is only part of the puzzle. The company will also need to establish an “entirely new supply chain” for high-performance thermal protection tiles and manufacture them in very high volume.
It’s a difficult problem, but solving it would bring them closer to the holy grail of launchers: total reusability. SpaceX has made major strides in reusability with its Falcon 9 rocket – which has flown 56 times so far this year alone – but although the company recovers the booster, the second stage is spent in its target orbit. By reusing both stages of the rocket, SpaceX hopes to reduce costs to a fraction of what they are today, while delivering several orders of magnitude more mass to orbit in a single launch. (SpaceX’s Transporter rideshare missions cost $6,000 per kilogram.)
If all goes as planned, the company will demonstrate its ability to return Starship to Earth via a controlled re-entry and gentle splashdown in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX also aims to return the booster, called Super Heavy, also via ocean landing. And it will move closer to bringing online the largest and most powerful launch system ever built, ready to carry cargo and eventually a crew to Earth’s orbit and beyond.
This upcoming Starship launch will be the fourth in a series of orbital flight tests that began last April. Before the launch can take place, SpaceX must receive a commercial launch license from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, the agency responsible for regulating commercial launch operations. The FAA also oversees investigations into rocket launches that fail for any reason. She therefore worked closely with SpaceX throughout the Starship test campaign.
And previous Starship launches have certainly gone wrong: the first two ended with violent mid-air explosions, and the third ended when Super Heavy and Starship likely disintegrated before hitting the ocean. But for SpaceX, which takes an iterative approach to hardware development, each test was ultimately a success because they provided engineers with data about the rocket in a real flight environment. And it’s true that each mission went further than the last: on the third flight, the engines ran for the entire duration of the vehicle’s climb, and Starship finally reached orbit for the first time.
Ultimately, SpaceX aims to land both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship second stage at its launch facility in southeast Texas, where they can be quickly refurbished and returned to the platform.
techcrunch
