About five and a half minutes after the launch, the launcher's engines were ignited in order to move it to a vertical position and then align with the nose up to land on its bottom, however, as it was seen in the broadcast, the launcher overturned when its tip reached the ground at a huge speed and exploded about six and a half minutes after the launch
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Elon Musk's Mars dream crashed again, as the ninth prototype of SpaceX's Starship - SN9 spacecraft crashed this evening (2/2/2021) after what appeared to be a successful test flight launch to an altitude of 10 kilometers. The flight was Similar to the one SpaceX held in December 2020, when it launched an SN8 prototype on its highest and longest flight to date. This flight also ended with the crash of the prototype.
About five and a half minutes after the launch, the launcher's engines were ignited in order to move it to a vertical position and then align with the nose up to land on its bottom, however, as it was seen in the broadcast, the launcher overturned when its tip reached the ground at a huge speed and exploded about six and a half minutes after the launch.
"We had, again, another good flight up ... we just need to work on the landing a little bit," SpaceX chief integration engineer John Innsprocer said in a live webcast of the operation.
While Starship SN9 suffered the same explosive fate as SN8 two months ago, SpaceX sees the test flight as a step forward in launcher development. Multiple prototypes were built simultaneously at SpaceX's growth facility in Boca Chica, Texas, as its SN10 rocket was transferred to a nearby launch. Now they are checking if she was also not damaged by the explosion. Apparently, a new task will be added to the committee on behalf of the American Aviation Authority that investigates the SN8 crash in December.
The prototypes of the rockets are built from stainless steel, like the one represented by the early versions of the rocket unveiled by CEO Elon Musk last year. The company is developing the spacecraft with the aim of launching cargo and about 100 people at a time on missions to the moon and Mars.
Just yesterday (1/2/2021) SpaceX announced a lottery for two places on a flight to Mars that will consist entirely of civilians and not professional astronauts.
CEO Elon Musk drew the company's attention to the Starship project in May of last year, after SpaceX successfully launched its first astronaut mission. Starship is now the company's top priority,
Musk previously said the spaceship could fly people in 2020, but has since admitted that the rocket still has its stones. Many ways, including "hundreds of experimental tasks", before that
While SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launchers are partially reusable, Musk's goal is to make the spacecraft fully reusable—a rocket more akin to a commercial airliner, with short turnaround times between flights where the only major cost is fuel.
More of the topic in Hayadan:
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Landing with a parachute - on Earth or Mars? For each landing on Mars, the tarship will have to land several times on Earth.
In any case, the weight of the parachute may be extremely significant, especially when it comes to a monster like the starship. As far as I know, nothing this huge has yet been parachuted. Even for landing much more compact things like the manned Dragon, very complex and large parachutes must be used and the cost is not negligible. When parachuting from space, you have to deal with a supersonic entry speed of up to 20 km/h, which usually means several sets of parachutes, each of which has several opening stages. Anyway, when parachuting, it is difficult to control the target point, and it is a bit problematic when trying to bring the tool to land on a certain target. In addition to this, you have to deal with the encounter with the ground which takes place at a considerable speed and may damage the tool. Landing at sea may cause corrosion to the vessel and cause additional costs required to fish the vessel out of the water and restore it.
On Mars the picture is more complicated: the atmosphere is weak and almost unusable for parachute use. It is not a coincidence that all the landings were made in the Northern Hemisphere where the altitude is lower and the atmosphere is denser. For the landing of the lighter tools, inflatable balls were used to soften the final landing (Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity) and for heavier ones, a rocket crane was used to bring them to a safe and gentle meeting with the ground. The inaccuracy of the parachute affects the choice of the target, because you have to find a large and flat enough surface to ensure the landing - that is, places that are not really interesting from an aerological point of view (=geologically of Mars).
Why *two* places?
Why the continuous disdain for the Hebrew language and readers?
I didn't understand why it wasn't easier to use a parachute, or a combination of an engine and a parachute. Mars also has an atmosphere.
Apparently one of two engines that were supposed to operate during the final landing phase failed to ignite. I also didn't like the shutdown of the second engine during the ascent phase. It should be noted that the Raptor engines are still experimental and have not yet reached a finished state. Apart from that, SN10 is therefore an additional launch and SN11 is also in line to perform the same 10 km mission. SN12, SN13 and SN14 have been canceled and a jump will be made directly to the more advanced SN15. It is also worth remembering that a year ago models exploded on the ground because they failed to build the fuel tanks so that they would keep the fuel at the required pressure, and they even had to learn how to fuel them in the correct order (a failure that caused the collapse of SN3) or how to disconnect them from the feed pipe (which caused the explosion of SM4) .