spacex successfully caught This is the second super heavy booster. During Starship's 7th test flight from Boca Chica, Texas, Super Heavy landed in the “chopstick” arms of the launch tower, allowing it to grab the booster.
Despite the successful catch, SpaceX lost communication with the Starship spacecraft mounted on top of the booster. “It successfully separated from the Super Heavy booster, but during that ascent phase, some of the engines shut down and shortly thereafter, we lost communication with the vehicle,” SpaceX's Kate Tice said during the stream. “We believe we have lost the ship.”
according to spacex“Starship experienced rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn,” but said teams are still examining the data to determine why this occurred.
Several people who said they were on the Turks and Caicos Islands said they saw the re-entry debris of the starship and Posted Video Its on social media.
This version of the Starship featured “major improvements in reliability and performance” this time, making the vehicle slightly longer, according to spacex,
With a redesigned propulsion system and an improved flight computer, this flight included “multiple metal tile options, including one with active cooling” to test alternative materials and “a backup layer to protect against missing or damaged tiles.” “A new heat shield was included. Prior to flight, SpaceX also said that on Starship's upper stage, “a significant number of tiles will be removed to stress-test vulnerable areas of the vehicle,” but it is unknown whether this was a factor in its destruction. .
The Super Heavy booster in this test was also the first booster to reuse a Raptor engine from a previous flight test.
At 403 feet long, Starship is the largest launch vehicle ever built. It is composed of two parts: the Starship spacecraft, which is designed to carry crew and cargo to orbit, and the Super Heavy booster, which comes with 33 SpaceX Raptor engines to propel Starship into space. helps. Both the Starship spacecraft and its Super Heavy booster are reusable.
During its seventh test flight, Starship was to deploy 10 Starlink “simulators” for the first time. These fake satellites are the same size and weight as Starlink's actual internet satellites, but they were not supposed to be in space. Instead, they would have had “a suborbital trajectory similar to that of a starship” and “would have died upon entry.”
Update, January 16: Noted the outcome of the flight and added video of the debris over Turks and Caicos.