It was one of the most impressive tech events of the year. On October 13, 2024, Starship, the world’s largest and most powerful rocket, was launched into space from a launch pad in Texas. The main accelerator reached an altitude of more than 65 km before it began to return to Earth at a speed greater than the speed of sound.
A crash was averted when the rocket – built by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX – restarted its engines and slowed until it hovered above the tower from which it had been launched just seven minutes earlier. The pincer claws grabbed the giant launcher and held it firmly in its grip, ready for reconditioning and relaunch.
“This is a day for the engineering history books,” said Kate Tice, SpaceX engineer.
The prestigious research journal Science was equally enthusiastic: “The performance heralds a new era of affordable high-capacity rockets that could lower the cost of scientific research in space,” the magazine announced a few weeks ago when it awarded the flight from October of Starship as one of the discoveries of the year.
Musk’s company has already reduced the cost of placing cargo into Earth’s orbit by 10 times, the journal said. After Starship — the most powerful launcher ever built and designed to be fully and rapidly reusable — is fully operational later this year, further reductions of a similar magnitude can be expected, the magazine added.
The year 2025, even more ambitious for SpaceX
That view is shared by many space engineers, who believe Starship is about to take a major leap, with a schedule that could allow for launches every two or three weeks. SpaceX engineers have learned how to recover and reuse its main booster stage and will do the same for its upper stage this year, they say.
A total of 25 flights are now planned for next year, an amazingly ambitious schedule.
“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that the schedule they’re working on is unprecedented,” said astrophysicist Ehud Behar, a professor at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, according to The Guardian.
In the past, access to space was too precious to risk failure, so components of NASA’s missions are tested countless times, driving up costs, he pointed out.
“But with routine spacecraft flights, scientists will be able to take more risks, building instruments with cheap, commercially available parts and launching them often,” says the specialist
Fleets of robotic rovers, not just individual vehicles, could be sent to Mars, while fleets of mirror segments could fly in formation to create giant self-assembled telescopes in space. Such visions are exciting, although the success of Musk’s rockets also has its downsides.
Musk could spell trouble for NASA projects
For starters, Starship is likely to destroy NASA’s own rocket system, the troubled and hugely expensive Space Launch System (SLS), which the agency has been planning for decades.
Its rockets are consumable, unlike Starship, which is reusable, while each SLS launch is expected to cost billions of dollars, compared to the $10 million target Musk has in mind for his system. Many scientists predict that Starship will make SLS redundant within a few years.
The other main issue for many scientists with SpaceX is that they have a hard time accepting Musk’s right-wing politics and his close association with Donald Trump. He has vehemently criticized US immigration policy, despised many Democratic politicians, and recently allowed Trump to cut $500 billion from the US federal budget.
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Source: www.descopera.ro
