SpaceX
After a series of strokes, Spacex’s largest rocket faces another high -gentrs to space for US space ambitions. Will you get Elon Musk’s iconic airline company to solve the problem of its explosive “starships”?
Spacex is preparing another test flight from its Starship rocket, after previous releases result in spectacular failure.
The imposing space ship, with two stages and 122 meters high, has had Difficulty in surviving beyond the first moments of flight; The last three attempts in 2025 culminated in.
The CEO and founder of the company, Elon Muskcall these incidents a “Unpamed fast disassembly” – An euphemistic way of describing the nature of catastrophic failures of your spacecraft.
The next release, which is expected to take place this Sunday, at Spacex Starbase, in southern Texas, will be the 10th Starship Test Flight.
The plan foresees that the gigantic launcher Super Heavydriven by 33 engines, boost the rocket to the edge of the space, Separate and return For a controlled landing in the Gulf of Mexico. The upper stage should then reach the orbit, release the load and reent in the atmosphere safely.
Despite these ambitious goals, previous flights demonstrated the challenges inherent in the development of Greater reusable rocket ever imagined, note a.
The Starship was designed to revolutionize space flights: Its mission is to transport cargo and crews to the orbit at unprecedented costssupport the Artemis missions from NASA to the moon and ultimately enable human colonization in Mars.
Get the monumental Super Heavy, the most powerful launcher ever developed, raise even from the groundit is in itself an aerospace engineering feat, and always a exciting moment that continues to impress with each new release.
“Developing a vehicle of this size and repeatingly not easy,” he says Jonathan McDowellastrophysicist in the center for astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. The success of the Starship is central to the Musk’s view of an interplanetary future sustained in revolutionary hardware.
But Not everything is running as planned: The previous releases invariably resulted in disaster, except for the fourth release, in June 2024, after which the Starship did for.
Recurring failures involved mainly escapes, fires and explosions In the fuel system of the rocket, which uses a cryogenic mix of liquid methane and oxygen.
Keeping these substances in liquid state requires extremely low temperatures, below –162 ° C to methane and –183 ° C for oxygen. The thermal efforts associated with the movement and burning of these fuels, combined with the vibrations during the launch, have been revealed difficult to control.
“Methane is a new fuel for space launches, so We are to learn How to manage your flow, ”explains McDowell.
Os Structural challenges aggravate the problem. Starship has to carry huge fuel loads while remaining extremely light, to reach its targeted ability to 110 to 165 tons in orbit – far above the capacity of the already removed spatial rockets from NASA.
The engineers had to dramatically reduce structural massa process that some describe as a “weight loss regime”For the rocket.
This extreme lightness makes the vehicle vulnerable to vibrations and dynamic forces during the launch, leading to speculation that these forces are at the source of repeated failures.
Previous flights also revealed that “harmonic oscillations” – Vibrations in fuel conduct and other components – caused escapes and fires.
Spacex tried solutions such as the reinforce fuel conductadd ventilation systems and improve heat resistant tiles.
Spacex has apparently used an iterative inspired by Silicon Valley’s creative processes: “construct-destructive-testing”: Each flaw serves to give information about the next design iteration. But the bets at play are high, noticing Scientific American.
Experts warn that, although there incremental progressthe balance between structural reinforcements and load capacity is delicate. Adding reinforcements to the ship structure implies an increase in its mass and can reduce performance, potentially compromising the central objective of the Starship: Fast and reusable space flights.
The pressure to succeed is not just commercial. NASA plans to use Starship NA, which aims to land astronauts at the southern pole of the moon in 2027. Reduced load delays or capabilities can compromise these ambitions, as well as long -term musk plans.
“Each time you add a component to correct something, increases the mass and diminis to the load capacity,” says McDowell.
Despite the numerous setbacks, Spacex remains committed to the development of Starship.
With each new launch of another Starship, investors, customers and space enthusiasts carefully follow the company’s epic journey, which seeks to prove that can overcome technical obstacles that so far have been in news for the worst reasons.
And this Sunday, we will once again see if Starship can finally get out of the launch platform intact – or if another dramatic entry in the news.
