The launch brings Musk's dream of colonizing Mars one step closer. Image Credit: SpaceX
The enormous next-generation spacecraft launched atop a Super Heavy booster in Texas earlier today.
Back in April 2023, the maiden test flight of the SpaceX CEO's ambitious spacecraft Starship ended with a bang when the vehicle exploded a mere four minutes after launch.
Then, a few months later, while the second test flight did see Starship manage to reach space for the first time and its two stages successfully separated around two-and-a-half minutes into the flight, the signal from the second stage was ultimately lost, suggesting that it had in fact self-destructed.
Now, for the first time this year, Starship has launched again and things are definitely looking up.
The third flight, which was live-streamed online, saw the next-generation space vehicle launch atop a Super Heavy booster from the SpaceX Starbase launchpad near Boca Chica Village, Texas.
Reaching a peak altitude of 234km, the spacecraft flew further and faster than ever before, although it did burn up during re-entry rather than make the planned splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
The booster, too, came to a violent end in the Gulf of Mexico after its engines didn't fully ignite.
Even so, the mission has been hailed as a success and a major step toward Elon Musk's goal of creating a viable interplanetary spacecraft capable of carrying large payloads to Mars.
"Starship reached orbital velocity!" he wrote.
"Congratulations SpaceX team! Starship will make life multiplanetary."
I'm not sure who that is, but Elon Musk is more like the new Thomas Edison... undoubtedly a genus, particularly when making money, but is given (and takes) the credit for a lot of inventions that aren't his.
Winston Rutherford the 3rd was a character in a book of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. called Sirens of Titan. I think it was written in the late 50s but was quite popular in the 70s. Governments could no longer afford space exploration and so it fell on the backs of very rich businessmen. Winston Rutherford lll was a rich businessman who kind of took over the space industry on his own. Until the scientific discovery of the chrono-synclastic infundibulum. No one could say for sure what would happen if one were to go past the chrono-synclastic infundibulum so Winston decided that he would be the o... [More]
I remember that book. Kurt even came to lecture at Texas Tech while my wife was a student there, She got to meet him and was thrilled and impressed. Apparently, he was very funny, cool, and personable.,.
Two moose hunters hired a bush pilot to drop them off at a remote lake to hunt. "When I come back," the pilot said, "you need to have the moose dressed, cleaned, and ready to go or we won't be able to handle the weight." When the pilot returned, the hunters were sitting there with a dead moose. "Why didn't you get it ready to go?" "The Pilot last year didn't make us do that." " Well, OK, lets give it a try" So he loaded the moose and hunters and taxied across the lake to take off. Just clearing the trees on the lake shore, they could not gain sufficient altitude and crashed a couple of h... [More]
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