SpaceX's Starship Rocket Returns From Space Successfully

 

                                                 A Replay of SpaceX Starship's 4th Test Flight

The fourth test flight of the SpaceX Starship was a stunning success.  

To see why it was a success, we need to compare this fourth test flight with the third one on March 14.  Early in that flight, the Super Heavy booster was supposed to simulate a landing over the Gulf of Mexico.  But six of the thirteen engines necessary for that maneuver shut down early.  Then, while coasting at the highest point of its trajectory, Starship began rolling out of control, and it disintegrated at an altitude of 40 miles.  This is what aeronautical engineers call a "rapid unscheduled disassembly"--in other words, BOOM!

Based on the data from that flight test, engineers made corrections to both the first-stage Super Heavy booster and the second-stage Starship.  This fourth test today showed that those corrections worked.

32 of the Super Heavy booster's 33 engines ignited.  And it was able to perform the maneuvers that will in the future take it back to the launch site.  In this flight, it simulated a soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico.

Starship coasted halfway around the world, survived the heat of re-entry, and made a water landing in the Indian Ocean.  At an altitude of about 30 miles, part of one of the steering flaps started to fall apart.  But even with this damaged flap, Starship did not blow up.

Starship is important for many reasons.  It is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built.  It is designed to be completely reusable, so that both the Super Heavy booster and Starship will be able to return to their launch pads to be used again.  This sharply reduces the cost of space rocketry.  Musk has predicted that someday it could be possible to send 100 tons of payload to space for less than $10 million.

NASA will use a version of Starship to take astronauts to the Moon by late 2026 (the Artemis III mission).  Astronauts will be back on the Moon for the first time since 1972.

Then, the next step is to go to Mars, and eventually establish a human settlement on Mars.  Starship could lift as much as 250 tons and accommodate 100 people on a trip to Mars.  That's the goal that Musk has had since his founding of SpaceX in 2002.

But as I have said in previous posts, the greatest challenges for humans going to Mars are not so much in rocket technology but in human biology, psychology, and politics.  Can human beings survive and thrive in space--perhaps by recreating artificially on Mars something like the biological and cultural environment of human evolutionary adaptation on the Earth?