the end of an era for Elon Musk’s megarocket

After a few eternal months of lights and shadowsSpaceX is ready to close a stage and move on to the next chapter. It’s launch Monday and the last Starship V2 is on the pad, stacked for takeoff. If all goes well, it will be a final test before the long-awaited debut of the Starship V3, the most powerful rocket in the world.

Release date and time. The window for Starship’s eleventh test flight opens on Monday, October 13, at 18:15 CDT from Starbase, Texas. If there is a problem, SpaceX could delay the countdown by up to 75 minutes before delaying the launch by 24 hours. This time, the first takeoff attempt has favorable weather, with clear skies and light winds.

  • Madrid, Spain (CEST, UTC+2): Tuesday, October 14 at 01:15
  • Mexico City, Mexico (CST, UTC−6): Monday, October 13 at 5:15 p.m.
  • Buenos Aires, Argentina (ART, UTC-3): Monday, October 13 at 8:15 p.m.
  • Bogotá, Colombia (COT, UTC-5): Monday, October 13 at 18:15
  • Lima, Peru (PET, UTC-5): Monday, October 13 at 18:15
  • Santiago, Chile (CLT, UTC-4): Monday the 13th at 20:15
  • Caracas, Venezuela (VET, UTC-4): Monday, October 13 at 7:15 p.m.

How to see the flight live. As usual, SpaceX will broadcast the launch through their website and of your official X account. The broadcast will begin 30 minutes before takeoff. For those who want a multi-camera experience, channels like NASASpaceflight and Everyday Astronaut They will offer live coverage with their own cameras from near Starbase. And in Spanish, coverage of Space Frontier, Mission Control, Manuel Mazzanti either SpaceXStormamong others.

Goodbye to a historic platform. In addition to the last flight of Starship V2this will be the last liftoff for launch pad 1a in its current configuration. The structure survived a first explosive takeoff that left a crater in the concrete, was reinforced with a water-cooled steel plate in the following ones, and went down in history by catching a Super Heavy booster for the first time on the fifth flight. It will now undergo a profound remodeling for the new generation of rockets.

Farewell without landing. The protagonist of the mission will be the Super Heavy booster “Booster 15”, which has already flown and landed successfully on the eighth mission. Its objective is to test for the first time the landing sequence that future V3 thrusters will use, turning on 13 engines for initial braking, five to adjust its trajectory with greater redundancy and three to simulate a hovering flight over the Gulf of Mexico before saying goodbye with a splash.

A Starship on the limit, again. Ship 38 has an even tighter schedule. On the one hand, it will repeat the feats of the previous flight, including the deployment of eight mock-ups of Starlink satellites and the restart of a Raptor engine in space. On the other hand, it will undergo stress tests even more aggressive than those of the previous flight.

After the iconic image of Starship covered in rust upon her return on flight 10this time SpaceX has removed even more thermal tiles to see how many can be missing before the ship’s fuselage fails during reentry. The ship will also execute a banking maneuver in the final phase of the flight to test subsonic guidance algorithms, a step that will allow the ship to be aligned with the launch tower in future landing attempts (SpaceX plans to recover both the booster and the ship starting next year).

The generational leap to V3. But as we said, the highlight of the flight is that it marks the end of a stage. The current version of the rocket has had a spotty track record. While the Super Heavy boosters have worked almost always, the ships suffered four consecutive explosions before Ship 37 was redeemed on Flight 10.

Ship 38’s mission is to close this chapter with another success, courtesy of the small design changes that SpaceX has been introducing, as well as provide new data before SpaceX focuses entirely on the Starship V3, a beast that promises to increase the rocket’s low-orbit payload capacity from 35 to 100 tons.

Starship’s reliability is key not only to Musk’s Martian dream, but also to NASA, which depends on the rocket to return to the Moon. While Doubts grow and alternatives like Jeff Bezos’s are being consideredan eleventh successful flight would be a blow to the table and a definitive push towards the new rocket era. As Elon Musk often says, no matter what happens, a spectacle is guaranteed.

Image | SpaceX

In Xataka | SpaceX has spoken out about the rusty Starship: now you know how to fix the ship’s biggest problem

Leave your vote

Leave a Comment

GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings

Log In

Forgot password?

Forgot password?

Enter your account data and we will send you a link to reset your password.

Your password reset link appears to be invalid or expired.

Log in

Privacy Policy

Add to Collection

No Collections

Here you'll find all collections you've created before.