Today’s third test flight of SpaceX’s super-heavy Starship booster (IFT-3 mission) ended in partial success (more than the previous ones) — in fact, the team managed to «go further than ever before». The launch was broadcast live on in the SpaceX account on X/Twitter.
The biggest achievement of this test flight is that the Starship prototype (S28) first reached the desired Earth orbit and then successfully descended from it, although it failed to land softly in the ocean. Given the results of today’s test, SpaceX engineers have made quite a few changes to the design («thousands of changes», according to Elon Musk), taking into account the results of investigation of the explosive second attempt of IFT-2, when both stages after separation were blown up due to a clogged filter and leakage of liquid oxygen. Starship’s first orbital flight attempt is in April 2023, ended in a controlled explosion after the stages failed to separate.
This time, the entire Starship flight lasted about 50 minutes (compared to just over 8 minutes in the previous test). It was carried out according to a slightly updated plan, taking into account the mission objectives.
The Starship in full Super Heavy configuration (the height of the entire system exceeds 120 meters) launched from the pad at Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, at 15:25 Kyiv time on March 14, 2024. This is the second consecutive successful launch without any delays or postponements.
The first stage worked perfectly until the final stage of the launch. At approximately 2:49 after launch, the Starship superheavy launch vehicle with all 33 accelerator engines (all working, none failed) reached an altitude of 72 km, where a successful «hot» separation took place: most of the Super Heavy B10 accelerator engines shut down and the S28 engines started up at the same time.
This is the second time the Starship team has managed to demonstrate hot undocking. The first stage successfully performed the Boostback Burn maneuver (the same way Falcon 9 / Falcon Heavy stages are returned) and entered the landing trajectory, but in the last meters before being brought to the ocean, the team lost contact with the booster. Preliminarily, not all engines at this stage worked as planned, so the booster was unable to slow down enough for a soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico.
As for the Starship, after separation from the accelerator, it turned on all 6 engines and continued to climb along the planned trajectory — it reached an altitude of about 150 km, successfully entered Earth orbit with an apogee of about 235 km, and turned off the engines. Next, the spacecraft successfully tested the mechanism for opening and closing the payload bay doors (in the video below) and pumping cryogenic fuel from the small tank to the main tank. After that (about 40 minutes after launch), the re-entry procedure began. And then the problems began: the ignition of the vacuum Raptors, which was supposed to be the first demonstration of their work, did not occur (for some reason, the onboard computer did not follow the command).
Eventually, the Starship re-entered the atmosphere without compromising the structural integrity, maneuvering only with the lattice rudders. In the video broadcast, you can see small fragments flying off the ship during reentry into the upper atmosphere. Many heat shielding tiles also fell off. At an altitude of about 65 km and a speed of 7.14 km/sec, communication with the ship was lost. Most likely, the autonomous safety system, after detecting deviations from the planned parameters, activated the emergency flight abort system, which destroyed the ship somewhere over the Indian Ocean.
Finally, during this launch, the SpaceX team also tested the operation of the cameras and stable Starlink connection, giving us many angles and incredibly beautiful shots from the Starship. Just a few seconds of video of the plasma enveloping the spacecraft during reentry is worth a look.
SpaceX has repeated several times that the main goal of this test (as well as any other) is to collect important data to continue development. Therefore, the team will need some time to analyze all the data collected in detail and find out where adjustments need to be made to ensure that at least one of the stages makes a soft landing next time. Hopefully, this time the investigation will take less time and SpaceX will quickly get a license from the regulator for the next test — it has already built enough boosters and vehicles.
Earlier, SpaceX asked the regulator to FAA authorizes at least 9 test launches of Starship by the end of the year. At the same time, Elon Musk, responding to Ars Technica’s space editor Eric Berger, expressed hope for at least 6 more Starship launches this year. Therefore, it is quite possible that Starship V2 will be launched this year.