Starship is about to launch on its fifth flight, and this time there’s a catch
- by Ars Technica
- Oct 13, 2024
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Early Sunday morning, SpaceX will try something no one has ever done before. If all goes according to plan, around seven minutes after lifting off from South Texas, the huge stainless steel booster from SpaceX's Starship rocket will come back to the launch pad and slow to a hover, allowing powerful mechanical arms to capture it in midair.
This is SpaceX's approach to recovering Starship's Super Heavy booster. If it works, this method will make it easier and faster to reuse the rocket than it is to recycle boosters from SpaceX's smaller Falcon 9 launch vehicle. Falcon 9's boosters usually come down on a floating drone ship stationed hundreds of miles out to sea, requiring SpaceX to return the rocket to shore for refurbishment.
“We’re going for high reusability," said Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX's vice president of build and flight reliability.
Sunday's test flight will be the fifth launch of SpaceX's full-scale Super Heavy/Starship rocket, the largest flying object ever to take off from planet Earth. The fully stacked launcher stands 397 feet (121 meters) tall and measures 30 feet (9 meters) wide. The Super Heavy booster's 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines will generate nearly 17 million pounds of thrust, more than twice the power of NASA's Saturn V rocket from the Apollo lunar program.
The Federal Aviation Administration approved a launch license Saturday for SpaceX to launch Starship, ending a prolonged regulatory review of SpaceX's flight plan that largely focused on the impacts of the sonic boom created by the returning Super Heavy booster.
Early Sunday morning, around 50 minutes before liftoff, SpaceX will begin loading cryogenic methane and liquid oxygen propellants into the two-stage rocket.
The 30-minute launch window opens at 7:00 am CDT (12:00 UTC), about a half-hour before sunrise at SpaceX's Starbase launch site near Brownsville, Texas. You can watch the launch live on SpaceX's X page or on one of several third-party YouTube livestreams. We have embedded a livestream from LabPadre and Spaceflight Now here.
The rocket's 33 Raptors will fire more than two-and-a-half minutes to propel Starship into the rarefied uppermost reaches of the atmosphere. Then, the Super Heavy booster, itself 232 feet (71 meters) long, will detach from the Starship upper stage, flip around to point its engines in the direction of travel, and reignite some of the Raptors to reverse course and return to Starbase. Super Heavy's supersonic descent will culminate in another restart of some of its engines to steer itself into position for the launch tower's two arms—sometimes called "mechazilla arms" or "chopsticks"—to close around the rocket.
This first-of-its-kind return-to-launch-site maneuver is risky. It took SpaceX several tries before the company finally accomplished a smooth on-target landing of a Falcon 9 booster.
“We’ll see the booster fly back and land at the tower and be captured by the arms, or we’ll take out the tower," Gerstenmaier joked on October 9 in a meeting of a National Academies committee on scientific research in space.
If this works, expect a rowdy celebration from SpaceX mission control. Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, first revealed the plan to catch the Super Heavy booster in a post on Twitter, now known as X, in December 2020.
Musk announced SpaceX's approach to landing and reusing Falcon 9 boosters in 2011 and achieved the first successful recovery four years later. A successful recovery of the Super Heavy booster Sunday would also come four years after Musk's announcement of the catch method.
Artist's illustration of catch arms ensnaring SpaceX's Super Heavy booster.
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