After the unmanned “Starship” took off from Starbase in Texas on Thursday, employees of the American company began to applaud. However, the flight ended abruptly less than four minutes later when the two rocket stages failed to separate. “We’ve learned a lot for the next test launch in a few months,” wrote Elon Musk on the Twitter short message service – more on that at SpaceX rates the “Starship” launch a success (news.ORF.at).
“The dimensions of the ‘Starship’ are really impressive,” says Magnes, who heads the research group on space magnetometers at the IWF of the Graz Academy of Sciences. His team followed the start live. According to him, the explosion during the test flight was not so disappointing because the project was very “ambitious”; it’s questionable that the timeline for the moon’s ambitions now holds.
The 120-metre-long rocket will in future transport more than 100 tonnes of cargo into space, where it can also be refueled. According to NASA’s plans, the “Starship” of the American space company SpaceX will take astronauts to the moon as early as 2025, and SpaceX still hopes to reach Mars with the sophisticated system.
Reached new dimensions
In any case, “huge masses” must be brought into space for lunar plans. At least it was shown on Thursday that it is possible to take off with it. Compared to the lift-off of ESA’s “Juice” mission last week, in which researchers from Graz are also involved, we are dealing with a different world here: the European rocket Ariane 5 had a launch weight of 770 tonnes, which is more than twice as high as the SpaceX high system took off with a weight of 5,000 tons. “These are unbelievable proportions. That’s a huge achievement,” said Magnes.
However, the flight ended after about three minutes: apparently there were problems with the separation of the first stage from the 70-meter-high booster. There is now an abundance of sensor data on temperatures and speeds that researchers need to analyze.
But even before that, the rocket’s flight no longer seemed stable – for the space explorer, this is an indication that they “got off course” even before the planned separation and that the vehicle was allowed to explode in a controlled manner before the explosion. reinforcement.
An instructive test flight
You’ll “learn a lot” from the first test, says Magnes. So far, no one can say when the next flight might take place: if you’re dealing with a single problem as a starting point, it’s certainly going to be faster than if you run into a design error in the analysis.
The moon will probably take a long time to arrive
This also applies to NASA and its manned lunar ambitions as part of the “Artemis” program, in which the ESA and therefore Europe also have a stake. Getting people to the moon “would be the main task of ‘Starship’ for the foreseeable future”, Magnes pointed out: “To keep those plans going, the launch probably should have worked absolutely perfectly.”