Новини

BOCA CHICA, Texas — SpaceX’s Starship, a futuristic vehicle designed to eventually carry astronauts to the moon and beyond, was poised for a third uncrewed test launch Thursday that Elon Musk’s company hopes will carry it farther than before, even if it ends up exploding once again in flight.

The spacecraft, mounted atop its towering Super Heavy rocket booster, was due for liftoff as early as 8 a.m. EDT from SpaceX’s Starbase launch site on the Gulf of Mexico near Boca Chica, Texas.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration just granted a license for the test flight on Wednesday afternoon.

Unlike the first two test flights last year, aimed mainly at demonstrating that the spacecraft’s two stages can separate after launch, the third test flight will involve an attempt to open Starship’s payload door and reignite one of its engines in space.

Each of the previous flights were routed toward a planned crash landing near the Hawaiian islands in the Pacific, while the latest flight is targeting a splashdown zone in the Indian Ocean.

Even if it achieves more of its test objectives than before, SpaceX acknowledges a high probability that Starship’s latest flight will end up like the first two, with the vehicle blowing itself to bits before its intended trajectory is complete.

Regardless of how well it performs on Thursday, all indications are that Starship remains a considerable distance from becoming fully operational.

Musk, SpaceX’s billionaire founder and CEO, has said the rocket should fly hundreds of uncrewed missions before carrying its first humans. And several other ambitious milestones overseen by NASA are needed before the craft can execute a moon landing with American astronauts.

Still, Musk is counting on Starship to fulfill his goal of producing a large, multipurpose next-generation spacecraft capable of sending people and cargo to the moon later this decade, and ultimately flying to Mars.

Closer to home, Musk also sees Starship as eventually replacing the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as the workhorse in company’s commercial launch business that already lofts most of the world’s satellites and other payloads to low-Earth orbit.

For Thursday, SpaceX is aiming to at least exceed Starship’s performance with its Super Heavy booster during their inaugural test launch together last April, when the spacecraft exploded over the Gulf less than four minutes into a planned 90-minute flight.

That flight went awry from the start. Some of the Super Heavy’s 33 Raptor engines malfunctioned on ascent, and the lower-stage rocket failed to separate as designed from the upper-stage Starship, leading to termination of the flight.

The second test flight in November made it farther than the first, and managed to properly achieve stage separation, but the spacecraft exploded about eight minutes after launch.

SpaceX’s engineering culture, considered more risk-tolerant than many of the aerospace industry’s more established players, is built on a flight-testing strategy that pushes spacecraft to the point of failure, then fine-tunes improvements through frequent repetition.

NASA, SpaceX’s biggest customer, has a lot riding in the success of Starship, which the U.S. space agency is giving a central role in its Artemis program, successor to the Apollo missions that put astronauts on the moon for the first time more than 50 years ago.

While NASA Administrator chief Bill Nelson has embraced Musk’s frequent flight-testing approach, agency officials in recent months have made clear their desire to see greater progress with Starship’s development as the U.S. races with China to the lunar surface.
…

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill Wednesday that would force short-video app TikTok, used by about 170 million Americans, to separate from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, or face a ban. VOA Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson says the Senate may not approve the bill.
…

Tokyo — A rocket made by a Japanese company exploded just after launch on Wednesday, with public broadcaster NHK showing footage of the fiery failure.

Tokyo-based startup Space One had been aiming to become the first Japanese private firm to successfully place a satellite into orbit.

Its 18-meter solid-fuel Kairos rocket blasted off from the startup’s own launch pad in Wakayama prefecture in western Japan, carrying a small government test satellite.

But seconds after the launch, the rocket erupted into a ball of flame, with black smoke filling the launch pad area.

Burning debris was seen falling onto the surrounding mountain slopes as sprinklers began spraying water.

“The launch of the first Kairos rocket was executed, but we took a measure to abort the flight,” Space One said in a statement, adding that “details are being investigated”.

The failure marks a blow to Japan’s efforts to enter the potentially lucrative satellite-launch market.

The government wants to assess if it can quickly launch temporary, small satellites when and if its existing spy satellites malfunction.

Kairos had been hoped to put the satellite into orbit around 51 minutes after launch.

Space One was established in 2018 by a team of major Japanese tech businesses, including Canon Electronics, IHI Aerospace, construction firm Shimizu and the government-owned Development Bank of Japan.

Last July another Japanese rocket engine exploded during a test around 50 seconds after ignition.

The solid-fuel Epsilon S was an improved version of the Epsilon rocket that had failed to launch the previous October.

Its testing site in the northern prefecture of Akita was engulfed in flames and a huge plume of grey smoke rose into the sky.

The malfunction came after Tokyo in March 2023 had seen its second attempt to launch its next-generation H3 rocket fail after liftoff.

Last month though Japan’s space agency toasted a successful blast-off for its new flagship rocket, the H3, after years of delays and two previous failed attempts.

The H3 launched from the Tanegashima Space Center in southwestern Japan, sparking cheers and applause at JAXA control center.

It has been mooted as a rival to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and could one day deliver cargo to bases on the moon.

That followed Japan’s successful landing in January of an unmanned probe on the moon, albeit at a wonky angle, making it just the fifth country to achieve a “soft landing” on the lunar surface.
…

Scientists in Alaska are developing a cloud-based approach to storing and analyzing data about volcanoes, in hopes of increasing the speed with which they can predict eruptions. Phil Dierking has our story. (Camera and Produced by: Philip Dierking)
…