The sheer scale of Starship, which is deemed the world’s most powerful rocket, and its successful liftoff is a feat in itself.
“This is a very large launch vehicle, and bigger can be more complicated to engineer,” Weitekamp said. “It’s very impressive.”The problems began as SpaceX attempted main engine cutoff and separation. This is a key window for SpaceX engineers: It provides insight into what was working well in the spacecraft, and what wasn’t, and will inform engineers how to ready its future spacecraft for launch.
“It is too soon to speculate what happened there,” Weitekamp said. “Engineers learn a lot from failure, and that’s a part of the engineering process. And having a ‘failure’ at that point still meant that this was a flight that had a number of things go really right.”Weitekamp recalled hearing, an aerospace engineer, speak at a conference in Washington in the 1990s.
“He was very pleased,” Weitekamp said. Ramo pointed out that there was great success in his sideways launch: major parts of the rocket clearly worked. “‘The actual propulsion was working. … We now just need to make it go up,’”Starship’s role in space exploration Starship is designed to lift large amounts of cargo and, eventually, people, into Earth’s orbit before sending them to the moon and perhaps one day Mars.Once operational, SpaceX intends to use Starship to launch its Starlink satellites, which beam internet signals to ground stations, providing connectivity in remote and rural areas.In 2021, the U.S. space agency awarded SpaceX a $2.
But SpaceX also lost several Falcon 9 rockets to explosions when the company was still trying to nail landing the system. Today, it may be the most reliable rocket in history, with 61 successful launches last year.
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