SpaceX on Tuesday successfully completed a flight of less than a minute of the largest prototype ever tested of the future rocket Starship, which the company hopes to use one day to colonize Mars.
“Mars is looking real,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk wrote on Twitter in response to a fan.
The current Starship prototype is fairly crude: It is a large metallic cylinder, built in a few weeks by SpaceX teams on the Texas coast, in Boca Chica, but it is still smaller than the actual rocket will be.
Photo: AP
Several previous prototypes exploded during ground tests, during a learning process of trial and error.
In images shared on Tuesday by several space specialists, including space news Web site NASASpaceFlight.com, the latest prototype — dubbed SN5 — reached an undetermined altitude before descending to land in a cloud of dust, demonstrating good trajectory control.
“And when the smoke cleared, she stood there majestically, after the 150 meter flight!” NASA’s top scientist Thomas Zurbuchen tweeted.
The so-called “hop test” was planned to reach 150m, but SpaceX has not confirmed any details about the test flight.
Last year, an earlier prototype — the smaller Starhopper — flew to 150m and returned to land.
The Starship envisioned by Musk would be 120m tall and able to land vertically on Mars.
“We are going to the moon, we are going to have a base on the moon, we are going to send people to Mars and make life multi-planetary,” Musk said on Sunday, after welcoming NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley back from the International Space Station (ISS).
The pair, who returned from a landmark mission as NASA’s first crew to fly a privately built vehicle into orbit, recounted the loud, jarring ride they experienced through Earth’s atmosphere before a safe landing at sea.
At a news conference from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Tuesday, their first extensive public remarks since coming home, Behnken and Hurley said that they endured tremendous jolting forces as the SpaceX-built Crew Dragon, an acorn-shaped vehicle that had carried them to the ISS, fired rocket thrusters to slow its descent for re-entry then pierced the outer atmosphere.
“It came alive,” Behnken told reporters of the nearly 12-minute thruster burn. “It doesn’t sound like a machine, it sounds like an animal coming through the atmosphere.”
The two were launched to the ISS from Florida on May 31, embarking on a two-month journey to prove that the Crew Dragon capsule is safe for transporting humans to and from space.
While bobbing in the water just after splash-down awaiting recovery teams, Hurley said that they completed one final test objective for the mission — “making prank satellite phone calls to whoever we can get a hold of.”
“There was a real reason for it,” as that they needed to prove they could contact mission control using a satellite phone in case the crew landed from space in an unexpected part of the ocean, he said.
Additional reporting by Reuters
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