Starship Flight 5: SpaceX will attempt a “stick” landing

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SpaceX will launch the latest test flight of Starship, the most powerful rocket system ever built that could one day carry people to the Moon and Mars.

The launch of the super-heavy launch vehicle, topped by the unmanned Starship spacecraft, is expected to occur during a 30-minute launch window that opened at 8 a.m. ET SpaceX's Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas. SpaceX said in an update Sunday morning that launch was scheduled for 8:25 a.m. ET (7:25 a.m. CT).

The launch will be broadcast live on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.

The aim of this demonstration mission is, for the first time, an ambitious attempt to maneuver the 232-foot (71-meter) rocket booster into a gigantic landing structure after it has used up most of its fuel and separated from the upper spacecraft. The Super Heavy may be caught in mid-air with a pair of massive metal tongs that SpaceX calls “chopsticks.”

In the meantime, the Starship spacecraft will continue to fly independently using its six onboard engines before practicing a landing maneuver over the Indian Ocean. SpaceX does not expect to recover the upper spacecraft.

The goal of each milestone is to explore how SpaceX might one day recover and quickly redeploy Super Heavy boosters and Starship spacecraft for future missions. Rapid reuse of rocket parts is considered essential to SpaceX's goal of dramatically reducing the time and cost of transporting cargo – or ships carrying people – into orbit and into space.

SpaceX ultimately plans to use the Starship capsule as a lander that will carry NASA astronauts to the lunar surface as early as 2026 as part of the Artemis III mission, and the company has government contracts worth up to nearly $4 billion dollars to complete this task. Ultimately, SpaceX also hopes that Starship will bring the first people to Mars.

So far, spacecraft development has focused on a series of increasingly complex test flights, starting in 2019 with short jump tests of a vehicle nicknamed “Starhopper,” which initially took off just a few centimeters from the ground. More recently, the company has moved on to bolder launches of the fully stacked Starship capsule and the Super Heavy booster.

The first test launch of a Starship and a Super Heavy – a so-called integrated test flight – took off in April 2023. This launch was aimed solely at getting the 397-foot (121-meter) long vehicle off the launch pad. And that's exactly what it did before exploding over the Gulf of Mexico just minutes into the flight.

SpaceX is known to fear major mishaps in the early stages of spacecraft development and says these mistakes help the company quickly implement design changes that produce better results.

With each subsequent launch, the company's goals became more ambitious.

The most recent test launch – the fourth in SpaceX's integrated test flight campaign – began in June. Both the launch vehicle and spacecraft survived re-entry into Earth's atmosphere and practiced landing maneuvers over the ocean, although they displayed a badly burned and wobbly wing during the webcast, a significant advance.

SpaceX now wants to push its testing even further and is trying to recover the Super Heavy booster after launch.

Ultimately, SpaceX plans to recover and reuse both the Super Heavy and Starship spacecraft. However, working out a booster recovery is a natural first step as SpaceX has extensive experience in this area.

Landing rocket boosters post-flight is a feat SpaceX has mastered with its smaller work rocket, the Falcon 9. Boosters from this rocket made soft landings on sea platforms or ground platforms after more than 330 launches – so these vehicles could be renovated and flown again. SpaceX says this has reduced costs, allowing the company to undercut the rest of the rocket market.

However, Starship is a far more powerful and complex system.

With 33 engines at the base, each more powerful than any of the nine engines used in the Falcon, the Super Heavy booster provides approximately ten times the thrust at launch.

Instead of attaching the landing legs to the side of the Super Heavy, as they adorn a Falcon 9's launch vehicle, SpaceX instead built a special tower to support the Super Heavy's return back to solid ground, in the hopes that it would still speed up the recovery process becomes faster.

The tower, dubbed “Mechazilla” by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk for its resemblance to a metallic Godzilla, has massive metal arms. The arms, or “chopsticks,” can be used to stack and move boosters and spacecraft at the launch site before launch — and they are essentially designed to catch the vehicles in the air as they return to Earth.

Musk's vision is that the rod arms will ultimately be able to simply turn around and place a rocket back on the launch pad within minutes of its return – allowing the vehicle to take off again after refueling – perhaps as early as 30 minutes after landing, the CEO said in one Interview on June 5th.

It's a bold vision. And SpaceX is still in the early stages of figuring out exactly how the catch will work.

Musk admitted in a July interview posted to YouTube that SpaceX's goal for this flight “sounds kind of crazy,” although it “has a good chance of working.”

“We’re not breaking physics,” he said, “so success is one of the possible outcomes here.”

According to the company's website, SpaceX will only attempt to capture the Super Heavy launcher if “thousands of different vehicle and landing surface criteria are met,” which requires “intact systems on the launch vehicle and tower, as well as a manual command from the mission's flight director.” ”

If the attempt is waved off, Super Heavy will attempt its landing maneuver over the ocean again. This should happen about seven minutes after launch, while the Starship spacecraft will cruise along the coast for almost an hour before attempting its controlled descent into the Indian Ocean.

One problem Starship faced during its fourth test flight in June, Musk said, was the loss of heat shield tiles – thousands of small, black hexagons attached to the spacecraft's exterior that are designed to protect the vehicle from extreme temperatures during re-entry. Losing a large number of these tiles significantly affected the vehicle's ability to attempt a soft landing, Musk said.

“Because of the lost tiles … the front flaps were so melted that it was like trying to control them with little skeletal hands,” Musk said, adding that the fourth flight was about 6 miles (9.7 kilometers) from landed in the sea away from the intended spraying point.

The company says on its website that it has conducted a “complete overhaul of its heat shield, with SpaceX engineers spending more than 12,000 hours refining the entire thermal protection system with newer generation tiles, an ablative backup layer and additional protections between the to replace valve structures.” .”

This could help Starship better survive the brutality of re-entry.

If this flight is successful, it could inspire the company to take on far more ambitious projects. SpaceX, for example, needs to figure out how to refuel a Starship spacecraft while it's stationed in orbit. Such a maneuver will be necessary to give the giant vehicle enough fuel to travel to the moon.

If the company fails to meet its goals or causes significant damage to its launch facilities, it could raise questions about further delays to NASA's lunar ambitions.

Artemis, NASA's flagship human spaceflight program, aims to put astronauts on the lunar surface for the first time since the end of the Apollo program more than 50 years ago.

The federal space agency has already warned that its goal of conducting the first manned landing on the lunar surface in 2026 could be held up by Starship's development schedule.

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