SpaceX Starship's 'monumental' test flight, explained | About That

hundreds of Spring Breakers rocket launch Chasers and SpaceX fans gathered in Texas to watch its most ambitious launch yet SpaceX didn't get the splash down that successful re-entry they were hoping for but they did get a lot done we are seeing 33 out of 33 Raptor engines ignited on the super heavy booster we've never seen anything like this before this is the the biggest flying object ever in space let's go through some of the key Milestones they reached and how Starship the biggest and most powerful rocket yet to fly fits into the future of space travel maybe the most impressive part of this Starship flight was its sheer speed and power shortly after liftoff the rocket reached its first major Milestone and what's considered the riskiest part of the flight successfully separating itself from its booster St separation SpaceX calls this the hot stage maneuver essentially the main rocket fires its engines while still sitting on the booster and then separates midair hot staging confirmed booster now making its way back seeing six engines ignited on ship SpaceX has only done this once before in November pulling it off again on this flight was seen as a reassuring sign they've mastered it from that point the rocket took off traveling farther and faster than ever before eventually reaching an altitude of more than 230 kilomet and hitting more than 26,000 kilometers per hour and it's not it's not just the fact that to get to those speeds what it is is the size of that rocket getting to those speeds the like this is the most massive rocket ever built and for it to do that to achieve that separation and get into orbit like in that suborbital um trajectory that was Monumental beyond the visually stunning success of the launch Starship hit a couple other more technical Milestones with this flight one involved opening and closing one of the Rockets doors sometimes called a Pez checkout and yes Pez refers to a Pez dispenser it's a SpaceX term of endearment for what's technically known as a payload door used to deliver and deploy cargo Like Satellites to and from the ship now it's kind of hard to make it out here but if you look at that second slit of light at the bottom of your screen watch it grow just a little that's the door opening and yeah that doesn't look all that impressive but according to Engineers this Pez checkout is actually a tricky thing to do and it's essential for one one of spacex's other goals of beaming highspeed internet to millions of people around the world SpaceX and musk have the goal of putting ever more star links uh into orbit like we're talking tens of thousands another agenda item for this flight was to move some of the fuel on board from one tank to another this was a small step in a grander plan which is to figure out how to actually refuel these Rockets while they're in orbit in just a few years one of these Rockets is set to travel to the Moon for NASA and eventually the goal is to get humans on Mars of course both of those Journeys will need a ton of fuel every pound every little ounce of weight matters uh so you can't get that much fuel up there if you're going to for example going musk's big goal of going to Mars you need to keep going up and reloading with fuel so they have to do a ship-to ship transfer where they will basically mate what on top of the other and transfer that fuel so that's why this was a a a test an important test overall many are calling the starship's most successful flight yet but that doesn't mean there weren't any hiccups what would have made this test a total slam dunk is if it managed to pull off a so-called controlled re-entry essentially the ultimate goal was to complete a successful takeoff from the Launchpad in Bach chica Texas Travel up into and back down through Earth's atmosphere without burning up and then splash down in the Indian Ocean in one piece and it's that last part of the plan where things went a bit sideways a little under an hour after takeoff space X's live stream did show the Starship plunging back toward Earth that bright orange sort of neon halo around the rocket that's plasma when the rocket comes back into the atmosphere it gets so hot and there's so much pressure the air around it becomes charged and forms that glow and seeing it is actually pretty rare usually the plasma disrupts radio signals now like we said this plasma field wow is wow what a view we hope to maintain these views throughout Starship is so big that we're hoping that the plasma field doesn't entirely blanket the entire vehicle right now it is not the star links are brought to you by starlink yeah the star links are still communicating and still uh capturing the data and the video that we see here these Rockets are coated in about 18,000 lightweight ceramic hexagonal tiles known as heat shields designed to protect them from those scorching hot temperatures and that Shield did appear to protect this rocket as it entered and re-entered the atmosphere at least for a while the heat shill tiles doing their work we talked about it earlier uh up to 2600 de F that those heat chill tiles are dissipating as we are re-entering but then just a few moments later right now we're still waiting to see if we're going to get data back from this ship we might be in a bit of a blackout period right now SpaceX now confirming that they have lost the sh Starship during re-entry losing contact usually means the Rockets either self-destructed or burned up in Earth's atmosphere in other words it failed to make that Perfect Clean Landing they were hoping for it was most likely the failure of the tiles but obviously they didn't actually you know protect it the way that it should have now there's a lot riding on all of this because SpaceX and NASA have huge goals for this rocket the eventual hope Thomas that you know this rocket system will eventually be able to take astronauts to the moon for NASA and ultimately sort of transform the commercial space flight industry Elon Musk is correct he's opening up a new chapter in the history of lunar exploration there's still a ways away from that this is just the third test of the Starship rocket its first test flight didn't make it very far blowing up shortly after takeoff number two we got a bit further at least managing to pull off that hot staging maneuver we talked about before eventually blowing up too but experts say failure is a vital part of the process I think this is typical of the way SpaceX does its testing you know their you know their their theme is to fail fast learn faster I'm sure they've learned so much and they I think they got at least past the points that they were hoping to get to with their with their test objectives and uh they'll be looking at it and getting ready for the next next one people following the progress of these tests seem to agree this most recent flight was a clear step forward

Channel: CBC News

Views: 50,286

Keywords: spacex, starship, starlink, space, moon, mars, elon musk, nasa, rocket launch, moon landing, cbc, cbc news, cbc explore, exploreapp, about that, Andrew Chang

Id: lv0zGH85X4c

Length: 7min 41sec (461 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2024