The tenth flight test rocket Starship of Spacex finally ended with a successafter two previous postponements due first to Technical problems to refueling systems and then to the bad weather conditions. Taken off by Starbasein Texas, at 18:30 on August 26 (local hours, 01:30 on 27 August in Italy), the prototype Starship Block 2 He achieved all the objectives set by the flight plan, ending with a controlled illustration in the Indian Ocean.
For the company led by Elon Musk It is a finish line Important, especially after the three previous tests had ended with a failure, raising concerns about the possibility that the Starship program was going on.
Let’s see in detail how the flight test went, also visible in the video below, and how important this success is for Spacex and for the Directoggio program Artemis.
How the tenth Starship flight went: the objectives achieved by Spacex
For Spacex it is the first success flight to the prototype Block 2 of the Starship spacecraft, launched for the first time in January of this year. All the objectives of the flight plan were achieved, despite some small technical problems have been found.
In particular, the launch began with the take -off of the booster Super Heavy (about 70 meters high) thanks to the ignition of all 33 engines Raptor. The rise phase was followed by a maneuver of Hot Staging (i.e. the ignition of the 6 Rapor engines of the Ship spacecraft while this was still connected to the Super Heavy), about 7 minutes after taking off.
At that point, the Super Heavy is in a controlled way in the Gulf of Mexico: before touching the water, however, the engines have been accessed again, so as to turn the position of the rocket upside down and make it enter the ocean with the bow cone facing upwards. The Super Heavy fooling was welcomed with great enthusiasm, since in the last test there was not even a soft return.
But it is the Ship spacecraft, that is, the upper stadium of the rocket, which gave the greatest satisfactions to the Elon Musk company. In fact, the Ship had never been able to achieve, in any of the previous tests, all the expected objectives. After the detachment from the Super Heavy, the spacecraft continued its suborbital flight to the Indian Ocean, during which they were deployed 8 fake satellite starlink v3 (released on the same suborbital trajectory of Starship), which then destroyed themselves by returning to the atmosphere. The goal, in this case, was to test the mechanisms of handling and release of a load, given that the new generation of Starship Block 3 should be able to Carry up to 60 Starlink.
The Ship has nominally turned on one of its engine in space (an objective achieved for the second time) and returned to the atmosphere without too many damage before thekneeling about an hour from take -off, inIndian Ocean: In this case too, recovery was not foreseen, but the data obtained will serve for the development and improvement of the next starship rockets.
Because the success of the tenth Starship flight test is so important
The success of the tenth Starship flight test represents a historic milestone For Spacex: it is the first time, in fact, that the company has achieved all the objectives set in a flight plan. The success of this launch, however, was not obvious: the three previous flight tests (that of January, March and May) had in fact ended with the explosion of the rockets in flight: consequently, more and more concerns began to spread on the actual estate of the Starship program and on the reliability of the company in the development of space prototypes.
It is true that Space X’s philosophy has always been to test the prototypes the most quickly possibleeven at risk of failing, so as to immediately identify any problems and solve them in the short term. Just the lack of results In the latest missions, however, he was questioning Spacex’s same ability to achieve his goals, considering that the Human Directors program also depends on Elon Musk’s company Artemis III, provided by NASA for 2027.
In short, the success of this tenth flight has allowed, on the one hand, to put the Starship program back on track, while on the other it has dissipated the doubts about the reliability of the Spacex prototypes.
