SpaceX Starship struts to show it has what it takes • The Register

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The Blue Origin New Shepard rocket, carrying Jeff Bezos, drew attention to its form when it launched last month.

Rival billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX spacecraft staged a show of its size on Friday.

SpaceX stacked its Starship SN20 upper stage on top of the company’s Super Heavy booster at its facility in Boca Chica, Texas, to test the fit of the two components that together made up the largest rocket ever built.

At 120 meters (394 feet), the Starship launch system overtook NASA’s Saturn V, which measured 111 meters (363 feet) and last flew in 1973.

The company’s stacking test, which lasted about an hour, is a prelude to plans to launch Starship on its first orbital flight, envisioned as a 90-minute trip from Starbase (Boca Chica) into space and return to a motorized and targeted soft landing on the ocean. off the northwest coast of the Hawaiian island of Kauai.

The Super Heavy booster, which is expected to separate about three minutes after the trip begins, is expected to see its shorter eight-minute flight end with a water landing about 20 miles off the Gulf of Mexico.

Eventually, SpaceX intends to recover both vehicles through controlled landings on land or at sea.

The test flight, submitted to the FCC for approval, has not yet been scheduled. There is an additional FAA environmental review that needs to be completed and there are other technical milestones.

Currently, SpaceX’s Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Dragon systems provide services for NASA and United States defense missions, as well as commercial operations. Its Starship system is intended to provide elevators in Earth orbit, to the Moon and Mars – up to 100 people at a time or 100 tonnes of cargo.

Last week, July 26, Blue Origin published an open letter to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson calling on the US Space Agency to undertake a more competitive bidding process before awarding contracts. .

Three days earlier, NASA awarded SpaceX a $ 178 million launch services contract for its October 2024 mission to study Jupiter’s moon Europa. But that’s insignificant compared to the $ 2.9 billion contract NASA awarded to SpaceX in April – Elon Musk’s company was asked to build the Human Landing System (HLS) for the Artemis program. from NASA, which aspires to bring astronauts back to the moon in 2024.

Soon after, Blue Origin and defense firm Dynetics filed objections to the HLS contract with the US Government Accountability Office. This led to the suspension and review of the NASA decision. But a week ago, the GAO denied the challenge and let NASA’s HLS contract stay with SpaceX.

Shape and size matter in rockets, but funding matters more. ®



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