Third time's the charm? SpaceX hopes rocket launch goes as planned
CBC
SpaceX will attempt to launch its 122-metre tall — or 37-storey — mega-rocket on its third test flight on Thursday.
The Starship rocket is SpaceX founder Elon Musk's pet project that he says will not only be able to spit out ever more Starlink satellites but also eventually take humans to Mars.
But the bigger, more pressing goal is to prove that Starship will be ready for NASA's Artemis III mission to the moon, slated to launch in 2026.
A variation of the SpaceX vessel, called the Human Landing System (HLS), will be critical to putting humans on the lunar surface. In order to do so, SpaceX needs to clear a number of hurdles, including demonstrating a ship-to-ship transfer of fuel.
But so far, Starship has seen only incremental achievements.
This launch is referred to as Starship's integrated flight test three (IFT-3), as it is the third time that both the booster and the spaceship itself are being launched together.
From the public's perspective, IFT-1 and IFT-2 were unmitigated failures.
In the first, last April, the rocket cleared its gargantuan tower before blowing up just four minutes later — Musk and his fans like to use the term "a rapid unscheduled disassembly" — before the booster stage and spaceship could separate.
And that was only what happened in the air.
Back on terra firma, the aftermath was vast. Because IFT-1 went up without a launch suppression system at the pad — something to soften the fiery blast and shockwave — its 33 engines left an enormous crater below the launch pad. Debris was scattered for kilometres, leading to a barrage of recommendations from federal officials about how to best minimize the harm to the surrounding ecosystem by future launches.
The second test flight, last November, had a suppression system in place and caused minimal damage to the pad. The rocket successfully lifted off and the two stages managed to separate successfully — a demonstration of a new way of separation called "hot staging."
Unfortunately, the first stage was lost in an explosion. The second managed to make it into space, reaching 149 kilometres, before it, too, exploded.
While explosions aren't something the public typically deems as achievements, that's not the way space watchers necessarily see it. And certainly not SpaceX.
It deemed IFT-1 a success because it cleared the pad without exploding.