THE’eleventh flight test of the rocket Starship ended positively for SpaceX: after the numerous previous failures and the first full success obtained only during the tenth launch, the company Elon Musk managed to meet expectations and give a turning point to the project, which has now officially concluded testing phase of the Block 2 prototype.
Left at 01:23 on October 14th (Italian time, 18:23 October 13 local time) from Starbase, Texas, after about 3 minutes the Super Heavy booster shut down its engines, separating from Starship and successfully ditching. The Ship 38 spacecraft, i.e. the upper stage of the rocket, continued its flight reaching 200 km, releasing 8 Starlink satellites and returning to the Indian Ocean 1 hour and 6 minutes after launch.
The credibility of the entire Starship program depended on this flight, considering that the human moon landing program also depends on SpaceX Artemis IIIplanned by NASA for 2027. This success, then, paves the way for the third generation of Starship’s booster, Block 3, scheduled to debut in 2026, bringing the company ever closer to its goal of bringing humans to Mars.
How the eleventh flight went and what this success means for SpaceX
The main objective of this eleventh Starship flight was to test the reentry maneuvers of Booster 15 and Ship 38, so as to improve them and make them more precise.
From the point of view of Booster 15, the initial phase of slowing down the descent occurred with the 13 central Raptors, exactly as in the past, but once detached from the rest of the spacecraft, the Booster then headed towards the pre-established landing point uusing 5 Super Heavy engines instead of 3. This modification, in fact, aims to make the re-entry maneuver safer, especially in the event of problems with the Raptors. The Ship 38 spacecraft, the upper part of the rocket, instead managed to release into space eight fake Starlink satellitesdeployed on the same suborbital trajectory as Starship, which then destroyed themselves upon re-entering the atmosphere.
During its flight, SpaceX also managed to launch a Raptor engine into space for the third time. After 1 hour and 6 minutes from launch, the Starship then concluded its flight ditching successfully at the pre-established point in theIndian Oceanas seen in the video below.
With this second consecutive success, SpaceX has therefore paved the way for the debut of the next generation Block 3dispelling doubts about the reliability of SpaceX’s prototypes.
The next tests: what Block 3, the third generation of the Starship booster, will be like
The October 14 launch was the last for the prototype Block 2 of SpaceX, a rocket almost 121 meters high: with the 12th flight, in fact, the Block 3 modelthe third generation of the booster, even bigger with 124 meters high and equipped with new Raptor engines. The company has scheduled its debut by 2026while the Block 4 version, 142 meters high, should be presented in 2027.
According to initial rumors, the upper section of the rocket, i.e. the Ship 39will have some differences compared to the previous version, 38: in particular, they would have been moved three Starlink terminals and the design of the catch-on-the-fly pins would be changed. Among the most important changes would be the integration of two new cylindrical-shaped structures, which should serve as docking points between two different Starshipsessential for carrying out the docking (the docking between two spacecraft) and transfer the propellant into orbit.
