Welcome to the PMBug forums - a watering hole for folks interested in gold, silver, precious metals, sound money, investing, market and economic news, central bank monetary policies, politics and more.
Why not register an account and join the discussions? When you register an account and log in, you may enjoy additional benefits including no Google ads, market data/charts, access to trade/barter with the community and much more. Registering an account is free - you have nothing to lose!
Elon Musk's SpaceX launched its Starship rocket for the first time, but fell short of reaching space after suffering a mid-flight failure. No crew were on board.
It's the culmination of years of regulatory work and technological tests for SpaceX and the largest and most powerful rocket ever built.
The company made a first go at getting this launch off the ground on Monday, but a pressure valve in the Super Heavy booster apparently froze. The company's teams worked to resolve a number of unidentified issues to make a second attempt possible on Thursday.
SpaceX leadership has repeatedly stressed the experimental nature of the launch and said any result that involved Starship getting off the launchpad would be a success.
...
SpaceX's next-generation megarocket — the largest ever built — launched on its second-ever test flight today (Nov. 18), a highly anticipated jaunt that took the giant vehicle to space for the first time, but it didn't last long. Shortly after stage separation, the rocket's massive Super Heavy booster exploded, with the Starship upper-stage vehicle itself detonating before reaching its target altitude in what SpaceX called a "rapid unscheduled disassembly."
"What we do believe right now is that the automated flight termination system on second stage appears to have triggered very late in the burn, as we were headed downrange out over the Gulf of Mexico," said John Insprucker, SpaceX's principal integration engineer, during a live webcast today.
The massive Starship and Super Heavy booster took off today at about 8 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT; 7 a.m. local Texas time) from SpaceX's Starbase test and manufacturing facility in Boca Chica.
...
SpaceX's Starship megarocket, the world's largest and most powerful rocket, reached orbital speed for the first time Thursday in a historic third test flight from South Texas.
Hundreds of Spring Break spectators, rocket launch chasers and SpaceX fans gathered along the southern shores of South Padre Island and surrounding areas to witness the third test flight of the biggest rocket ever built. About 5 miles (8 kilometers) south of the crowds, SpaceX's massive Starship vehicle lifted off this morning (March 14) at 9:25 a.m. EDT (1325 GMT) from the company's manufacturing and test launch facilities near Boca Chica Beach.
"Starship reached orbital velocity," SpaceX founder Elon Musk announced on X (formerly Twitter) after liftoff. "Congratulations SpaceX team!!" Both the Starship vehicle and its Super Heavy booster did not survive all the way through to their intended splashdown, but SpaceX officials said the test flight achieved several of its key goals during the flight.
...
Today's launch, designated Integrated Flight Test-3 (IFT-3), was the third test mission for the fully stacked Starship. The first and second Starship launches both ended explosively last year, with the vehicles detonating before the completion of each flight's mission objectives. However, data collected during those first flights helped SpaceX engineers get Starship ready for success down the road.
Improvements made between IFT-1 and IFT-2 last year included the implementation of a "hot staging" technique, in which the upper stage engines begin firing before Starship's first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, fully separates. IFT-2's hot staging maneuver was a success, as it was today as well.
High in the sky, Starship's two stages separated about 2 minutes 45 seconds after liftoff, sending the 165-foot-tall (50 m) upper-stage spacecraft onward to space while Super Heavy began preparations for a boostback burn to redirect its trajectory. That post-staging burn reversed Super Heavy's velocity, and was intended to be followed minutes later by a landing burn above the Gulf of Mexico. However, it appears the Super Heavy's engines did not relight as planned, leading to the loss of the booster.
"It didn't light all the engines that we expected and we did lose the booster," Huot said. "We'll have to go through the data to figure out exactly what happened, obviously."
Starship is designed to be fully reusable, and SpaceX plans to land and relaunch its Super Heavy boosters, as it does with its Falcon 9 rockets. In the future, two "chopstick" arms on Starship's launch tower will catch the Super Heavy booster as it returns for landing, but IFT-3's Super Heavy was always expected to splash down in the Gulf.
The video is pretty impressive..SpaceX catches giant Starship booster in fifth flight test
Oct 13 (Reuters) - SpaceX in its fifth Starship test flight on Sunday returned the rocket's towering first stage booster back to its Texas launch pad for the first time using giant mechanical arms, achieving another novel engineering feat in the company's push to build a reusable moon and Mars vehicle.
The rocket's first stage "Super Heavy" booster lifted off at 7:25 a.m. CT (1225 GMT) from SpaceX's Boca Chica, Texas launch facilities, sending the Starship second stage rocket toward space before separating at an altitude of roughly 70 km (40 miles) to begin its return to land - the most daring part of the test flight.
More:
and to think it took private industry to think outside the box and accomplish this feat!The engineering required to execute that booster capture boggles my mind. Very cool stuff!
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?