Since winning the presidential election on November 5, Donald Trump has not left his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Florida without Elon Musk. The richest man in the world last Wednesday for a meeting with congressmen prior to Trump’s visit to the White House. The weekend plan was to go on a private plane eating McDonald’s food to see a wrestling match in New York. And this Tuesday, Trump went to witness the launch of a SpaceX rocket in Brownsville (Texas) at the magnate’s invitation.
Musk acted as the president’s guide through the space company’s facilities before the sixth test launch of the Starship, the SpaceX ship, powered by the Super Heavy rocket. The Republican did not bring luck to the businessman. Minutes after takeoff, mission managers suspended capture of the rocket for unspecified reasons and let it fall into the Gulf of Mexico.
Not all criteria were met, so the flight director did not order the rocket to return to the launch site, a SpaceX spokesperson explained without clarifying where the failure was.
The empty ship launched on top rose for a near-circular loop around the world similar to October’s hour-long test flight, aiming for a controlled entry into the Indian Ocean after skimming through space.
Apparently, it has been a step back from what was a crucial moment in the evolution towards a fully and rapidly reusable launch system. The rocket successfully returned to the base and to the launch and capture tower.
After that success, Trump began to brag about Musk’s achievements at campaign rallies. “Those arms grabbed him like you grab a baby, like you grab a small baby. And they hugged him and put him down, and there he was,” the candidate said in one of them.
Furthermore, on that same test flight, the Starship upper stage achieved a controlled entry and high-precision splashdown in the planned area of the Indian Ocean.
The sixth flight test was aimed at expanding the capabilities of the ship and booster and getting closer to reusing the entire system. The objectives included returning the booster once again to the launch site for capture, restarting a Raptor engine on the spacecraft, which would be necessary to return from orbit, and testing a set of experiments with heat shields and changes of maneuver for re-entry and descent of the ship over the Indian Ocean.
SpaceX wants to completely recover and reuse the 121-meter Starship. Large-scale recycling would reduce the cost of transporting cargo and people to the Moon and, in the future, Mars, while speeding up the process. The recycling of SpaceX’s Falcon rockets that it launches from Florida and California has already allowed the company to be very competitive in the launch of satellites, revolutionizing a market that has become very lucrative for the company.
NASA has agreed to pay SpaceX more than $4 billion to land astronauts on the Moon on consecutive missions later this decade. Musk plans to launch a fleet of starships to one day build a city on Mars.
At the campaign rallies he gave to support Donald Trump, he mixed politics with his goals of creating a civilization on Mars. of a supposed machinery that managed it to establish a single-party regime in the United States. If that happened, there would be harsh regulations and “getting to Mars would be impossible,” he maintained. “We will remain forever confined to the earth,” he warned at one of the rallies, in which he assured that “the entire future of civilization” was at stake.
“The regulatory pressure year after year is worse, and there are more regulatory agencies every year, more rules and regulations, until finally everything is illegal,” he said in those interventions. “We had our rockets sitting on the pad for two months ready to fly. than the Government moves the paper from one table to another? So if that trend continues, which it will unless it’s a conscious effort to have deregulation and have sensible regulation, then Mars will be impossible. We will be forever confined to Earth,” which would benefit him greatly.
Trump and Musk have shown great complicity recently. Last week, at a party at Mar-a-Lago, the president-elect said Musk’s IQ is “about as high as it gets.” “He launched a rocket three weeks ago and then went to Pennsylvania to campaign because he considered this more important than launching rockets that cost billions of dollars,” he said, before joking about the billionaire’s constant presence at Mar-a-Lago : “He likes this place. “I can’t get him out of here.” “And you know what? “I like having him here,” he added. This Tuesday Musk was the host at his base and Trump was the guest.
