SpaceX has successfully launched its latest Starship rocket on a test flight, which took it halfway around the world while releasing mock satellites.
Starship is the largest rocket system ever constructed and has failed in six out of 10 of its previous tests, including exploding so dramatically that multiple flights had to be grounded as the debris rained down.
Monday night’s launch in Texas was the 11th test for the spacecraft Elon Musk envisages ferrying humans to Mars in the not-so-distant future.
By the mid-2030s, the billionaire hopes to establish a human colony on the red planet.
He plans to ferry millions of tonnes of resources to Mars, “warm up” the temperature, which is “a little cold”, and send out Starships full of new Martian residents up to 10 times a day during launch windows.
Because of the way Mars and Earth orbit the sun, it is only possible for us to reach Mars around every 26 months, with the next launch window opening in 2026.
NASA is also relying on a version of Starship in order to complete its Artemis mission, which will see astronauts return to the moon, although there are plenty of questions yet to be answered about Starship’s reliability for that mission.
In order to ferry Mars expats to the red planet, SpaceX’s Starship will have to be robust and reusable – this will significantly bring down costs.
The company has already shown it can catch and reuse its Super Heavy Booster (the bottom part of the rocket that gets the whole spacecraft off the ground) using impressive “chopstick” arms, as SpaceX calls them.
The booster used in this 11th test was actually the same one memorable caught in SpaceX’s eighth Starship test flight.
This time, however, the booster didn’t return to its chopsticks; instead, it briefly hovered and then made a controlled entry into the ocean in the Gulf of Mexico.
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Meanwhile, Starship skimmed space before it descended into the Indian Ocean. Nothing was recovered.
SpaceX also tested out the heat-resistant tiles that cover part of the rocket; surface temperatures can reach around 2,760C when a spacecraft reenters Earth’s atmosphere.
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In order to make quick turnarounds and be reusable, the heat shield on the rocket has to stay intact through multiple re-entries.
SpaceX also tested out a different route for the upper part of the rocket that more closely mimicked the path it’ll take when it returns to Starbase in the future.
