The starship rocket, the greatest and most powerful that man has known, managed to reach space on Tuesday, before exploding for the third consecutive. He did not, as in the two previous evidence, on the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, he took off successfully. Then, Spacex, an astronautical company owned by Elon Musk, said he had lost control of the aircraft after something he described as a “rapid unchanging disassembly.” The company communicated what that supposed: the rocket would not return to the ground, as planned. Finally, the artifact ended up exploding.
The takeoff, from the southernmost point in Texas, occurred at about 18:37 (1.37 Spanish peninsular time). It came out since, which is at the same time the Spacex space base and a municipality of recent foundation on the beach of Boca Chica, near the border with Mexico.
The huge structure drew a clean wake and rose on the Gulf of Mexico has ordered that it be rejected as a Gulf of America) until disappearing in the sky. They were enough for about eight minutes so that in the live broadcast, courtesy of Spacex, the first applause of the company’s engineers, relieved to verify that this time the rocket did not exploit in a thousand pieces immediately, as in the previous two occasions, were heard.
Then, more or less at half an hour, the disappointment came: the company lost control of Starship, which stayed, said the broadcas of the retransmission “something like spinning” in space. “In a test like this, success is based on what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability while Spacex seeks to make life multiply,” said the company in X, a social network that is also owned by the richest man in the world.
In that public square, Musk wrote: “The spacecraft managed to turn off the engines at the scheduled time: a great improvement with respect to the previous flight! In addition, there was no significant loss of thermal shield plates during the ascent. The leaks caused the loss of pressure of the main tank during the planning and re -entry phase. There are many useful data to review.” The tycoon also promised that “the launching cadence for the next three flights will be faster, approximately one every 3 or 4 weeks.”
Tuesday was the ninth mission – and NASA, as part of its Artemis mission – intends to take astronauts to the moon and Mars. The two previous explosions, in January and March of this year, left behind a rain of space scrap that forced the authorities to divert air traffic in the area. This time, the Megacohete endured much more in the air, and that can be considered as an advance, although success was not total for Spacex.
Musk, which seems to have passed the page of his incursion into politics to devote himself to his companies, after just over 100 frantic and chaotic days in Trump’s White House, he played a lot this Tuesday. The nerves of the tycoon were intuited in the decision to delay the other great event that he planned for that day: a conference, also in Starbase, in which he was about to talk about his plans to conquer Mars.
and then he was rescheduled to end up placed at 9:00 p.m., local time. Shortly before the launch, the call of the Spacex website and the company’s account in X disappeared.
After completing an investigation on, that of March 7, Spacex announced that changes had been made in the hardware employed in the rocket to prevent this failure from repeating and being able to “increase your reliability.” , one of the engines at the top of the aircraft exploded after five and a half minutes, and that caused the loss of its control.
Computer failure
The most likely reason was a computer failure, which caused the accidental ignition of one of the engines. “All debris fell into the controlled area, and there were no hazardous materials for marine species or water quality,” he said after the sinister Spacex, which occurred more or less at the same point of the trajectory as the accident recorded in January.
For this Tuesday, the Federal United States Aviation Administration (FAA are its acronym in English) approved the ninth launch of Starship, a huge ship of more than 120 meters high. In addition, the authorities increased the danger zone along the rocket trajectory.
“FAA considers that Spacex meets all the rigorous security and environmental requirements,” the agency published, which expanded the size of risk areas in the United States and in other countries to the step of Starship. The predetermined exclusion area, or aircraft danger area, doubled from 885 nautical miles to 1,600, extending east from the spacex launch site on the southern coast of Texas and, including the Bahamas and the Turkish Islands and Caicos, dependent on the United Kingdom.
The last launch of Starship was the first in which the Super Heavy propeller was reused, the most powerful in history, already used in the seventh flight, that of the past. Here is one of Musk’s main space bets: recycle those artifacts, which greatly lower costs. In these Starship flights, tweezers called “Mechazilla” have been successfully tested, large mechanical arms that Spacex uses to capture in the air the first part of its rocket, the super heavy, on its return to the ground.
It was to get the propeller to land on a platform located in the Gulf of Mexico instead of returning to the base. In addition, their engineers set out to deploy for the first time in orbit false satellites. It was also going to submit to stress added to the ship because Spacex had removed several thermal tiles that protect from friction with the atmosphere to “submit vulnerable areas of the ship to an effort test during the reentry”.
The inhabitants of Starbase voted to become independent as a municipality in early May, with the acquiescence of Texas Republican authorities. More than a town to use, it is rather a dusty crossroads on the ocean banks with a handful of single -family houses, whose original owners were selling after the installation of the base, as well as a camp of a camp of trailer retrofuturist that company users use. Its census adds 283 neighbors and almost all work for Musk, whose residence is set there. It is from the Rio Bravo and the Mexican border.
