Latest Starship flight prompts praise and worries at IAC
- by SpaceNews
- Oct 19, 2024
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MILAN — For many of the more than 11,000 participants at the International Astronautical Congress this year, the biggest news of the week-long conference was not anything that took place within the sprawling convention center here but instead more than 9,000 kilometers away.
The latest flight of SpaceX’s Starship/Super Heavy vehicle, which took place in Boca Chica, Texas, on Oct. 13, a day before the opening ceremony for IAC, demonstrated the ability of the Super Heavy booster to return to the launch site and be “caught” by mechanical arms attached to the launch tower. That was a major step towards the rapid reusability the company envisions for the vehicle, and which will be needed for some of its key near-term missions like NASA’s Human Landing System (HLS) program.
SpaceX itself kept a low profile at IAC, with no booth in the exhibit hall and no major presentations, but the flight was the talk of the show for many, illustrating SpaceX’s capabilities and, for some, a growing gap with the rest of the industry.
For NASA, the flight was a sign that development of the HLS version of Starship was on track for Artemis 3, which remains officially scheduled for no earlier than September 2026.
“Just yesterday, SpaceX has a very successful fifth launch as they develop this very large rocket,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during an Oct. 14 plenary session that features the heads of several space agencies. “This was another one of the steps in the iteration of developing that.”
He added at a press conference the next day that work on the HLS version of Starship was on schedule. “I think you saw as a result of Sunday’s test of SpaceX and its big rocket that they are moving along very well, and that will determine ultimately the timing for the landing of Artemis 3 on the moon,” he said. “As of Sunday’s test, it was right on the mark.”
“They are right on making the benchmarks as they are planning to land in late ’26,” he said of SpaceX later in the briefing.
The success of the flight was also welcomed by companies that plan to use Starship for other missions, from launching large payloads like commercial space stations into low Earth orbit to commercial missions to the moon.
For others in industry and government, though, the latest Starship test flight prompted different reactions, particularly among European companies and agencies as the continent emerges from a “launcher crisis” with the successful inaugural launch of Ariane 6 in July and the return to flight of Vega C in early December.
“Congratulations to SpaceX, what an incredible feat of engineering! Mars, here we come,” Rocket Factory Augsburg stated in a social media post Oct 14. “At the same time, the coin has a second side: it shows and confirms that Europe has completely lost touch. Can it still catch up? No chance. At least not the way things are going at the moment.”
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