Super Heavy crashed into Gulf of Mexico pic.twitter.com/hIY3Gkq57k

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) June 6, 2024

“Today was a great day for humanity’s future as a space civilization!” added.

The most powerful rocket ever built took off from the company’s base in Boca Chica, Texas, at 7:50 a.m. (12:50 GMT), then flew into space and flew halfway around the world, a journey that lasted about an hour. six minutes.

Featuring a fully reusable design, Starship is vital to realizing Musk’s ambitious vision of colonizing the Red Planet and transforming humanity into a multi-planetary species. Meanwhile, NASA has signed a contract for a modified version of Starship that will be the last vehicle to carry astronauts to the lunar surface as part of the Artemis program later this decade.

Trial and error approach

Three previous test flights had resulted in the destruction of Starship; it’s all part of what the company sees as an acceptable cost in its rapid, trial-and-error approach.

“The payload of these flight tests is data,” he said on SpaceX X, a mantra repeated by the commentary team throughout the flight.

Musk said the next challenge is to develop a “completely and immediately reusable orbital heat shield” and promised more tests to learn how to make Starship better able to withstand falling into the atmosphere at about 27,000 kilometers per hour (about 17,000 miles per hour). .

About seven and a half minutes after liftoff, the first stage launch vehicle, called Super Heavy, made a vertical descent into the Gulf of Mexico to loud applause from flight control engineers in Hawthorne, California.

The screams became louder in the last minutes of the flight. Ground crews screamed and screamed as the top lit up fiery red as a result of the plasma field created by the friction of the craft flying through the atmosphere.

Space fans around the world watched in awe thanks to a live broadcast via SpaceX’s vast Starlink constellation of internet satellites. A piece of flying debris even broke the camera lens, but eventually the Starship remained stuck during landing.

“Congratulations to SpaceX on Starship’s successful test flight this morning!” NASA chief Bill Nelson wrote about X: “Through #Artemis we’re one step closer to returning humanity to the moon, then we’ll look farther to Mars.”

Twice as powerful as the Apollo rocket

Starship is 397 feet (121 meters) long, including both stages; It is 90 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty. Its super-heavy booster produces 16.7 million pounds (74.3 meganewtons) of thrust, nearly twice as powerful as the Saturn V rockets used in the Apollo missions, and later versions are expected to be even more powerful.

SpaceX’s strategy of testing in the real world rather than in the laboratory has paid off in the past. Falcon 9 rockets have become the workhorse for NASA and the commercial sector, the Dragon capsule is sending astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station, and the Starlink network of Internet satellites now spans dozens of countries.

But time is ticking for SpaceX to be ready for when NASA plans to return astronauts to the moon in 2026.

To do this, SpaceX would first need to launch Starship’s main vehicle into orbit, then use several “Starship Refuelers” to fill it with supercooled fuel for onward travel; This was a complex feat of engineering that had never been attempted before. China is planning its own manned lunar mission in the 2030s and has recently had a better track record than the United States in meeting its schedules.