SpaceX has contracts with NASA worth about $ 4 billion for the design and development of Lander’s rated lunar based on a space ship design. Starship Lander is a central element of NASA architecture for the Artemis program, which aims to restore astronauts to the lunar surface later in this decade. In order for the starship to fly to the moon, SpaceX must fill it with super-voltuous prophents in orbit with low soil, which no one has ever done on such a scale.
Musk perceives Starship as an interplanetary spine for transporting load and people to Mars, one of its most consistent long -term goals. This also requires orbital refueling. Musk recently suggested that SpaceX may be ready to demonstrate the refueling of an orbital ship for a ship in 2026, A year later than the goal 2025 NASA officials discussed in December.
Starship will also introduce Starlink Starlink Spapexx internet satellites. Before Thursday’s premiere, the ground crew loaded four Starlink mock -ups in the Starship Gulf to test the rocket implementation mechanism. Officials willingly assessed the efficiency of the Starship Block 2 heat shield before trying to recover the intact ship (as SpaceX is already dealing with the Super Hefty Booster) in the future mission. But the premature end of this test flight means that these goals must wait.
SpaceX supervises Starship using an iterative development cycle. Engineers come up with fresh projects, test them quickly, and then contain conclusions drawn to the next rocket. No wonder that a few rockets blew up with this spiral cycle of development. But failures, especially with so many similarities, may indicate a more fundamental problem.
The flight plan until Thursday’s mission required the ship to be sent in the middle of the world from Texas, whose culmination is controlled by the Indian Ocean re -entering the northwest of Australia.
The test flight was to be a transformation of the previous spacecraft flight on January 16, when the upper stage of the rocket-known as a spacecraft or a ship-was resisted to fires powered by fuel leaks in the engine chamber. The engineers determined that the most likely cause of fuel leak was a harmonic answer several times stronger than expected, which suggests that the vibrations when climbing the ship into space were resonance with the natural frequency of the vehicle. This would intensify vibrations beyond the levels of expected engineers.