404 pēdu garais (123 metru) zvaigžņu kuģu raķete un super smagais pastiprinātājs stenda SpaceX palaišanas spilventiņā. Priekšplānā ir tukši iekraušanas doki, kur tankkuģu kravas automašīnas piegādā propelentus un citas gāzes uz palaišanas vietu.
Kredīts: Stefans Klarks/ARS Technica
Instead, SpaceX’s schedule for catching and reusing Starship and refueling the ships in orbit is well into the next year. A moon landing is likely at least several years away. And a landing on Mars? Maybe in the 2030s. Before Starship can hit those milestones, engineers need to get the rocket to survive a splashdown from liftoff. That would confirm that recent changes to the ship’s heat shield are working as intended.
Three test flights that attempted to do just that ended prematurely in January, March, and May. Those failures prevented SpaceX from collecting data on several different tile designs, including insulators made of ceramic and metallic materials and tiles with “active cooling” to strengthen the craft as it re-enters the atmosphere.
The heat shield is supposed to protect the rocket’s stainless steel skin from temperatures reaching 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius). During test flights last year, it worked well enough for Starship to propel itself toward a controlled descent into the Indian Ocean, halfway around the world from SpaceX’s launch site at Starbase, Texas.
But the ship lost some of its tiles during each flight last year, damaging the ship’s underlying structure. While it wasn’t bad enough to prevent the vehicle from reaching the ocean, it would make it difficult to re-launch the rocket for another flight. Eventually, SpaceX wants to catch returning starships from space with giant robotic arms back to the launch pad. The vision, according to SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, is to recover the ship, quickly install it on another booster, refuel it, and launch it again.
If SpaceX can pull it off, the craft should return from space with its heat shield intact. Evidence from last year’s test flights showed that engineers have a long way to go to make that happen.
