SpaceX founder Elon Musk told reporters later the issues would be resolved and addressed before a second orbital attempt in the next month or so. The booster and Starship upper stage failed to separate and the vehicle's self-destruct system was triggered well before reaching the threshold of space. A half dozen of the booster's first-stage engines either did not fire or shut down early. The rocket blasted off for the first time on April 20 but quickly ran into problems. The Starship upper stage is equipped with six Raptors. The Super Heavy/Starship is more than twice as powerful as NASA's SLS, generating 16 million pounds of thrust at liftoff with 33 company-designed Raptor engines burning methane and liquid oxygen. So when you step back and you look at (it), that's a lot of launches to get those missions done." We're delaying our CDR (critical design review) until they complete that. "One milestone before that is the ship-to-ship cryogenic propellant transfer. "SpaceX is on contract to do an uncrewed lander," Free said. SpaceX has not revealed how many Starship tanker flights might be needed or details about the robotic refueling process to transfer thousands of gallons of ultra-cold liquids from one vehicle to another in low-Earth orbit. Multiple problems triggered its self-destruct system four minutes after liftoff. The Super Heavy/Starship blasted off on its maiden flight on April 20. SpaceX is under contract to NASA to carry out an unpiloted lunar landing test flight to clear the way for the Artemis 3 mission.īut the Starship lander will burn up much of its propellant reaching low-Earth orbit, and multiple Super Heavy/Starship flights will be needed to re-fill its tanks before the spacecraft can head for the moon. After a week or so of exploration, the HLS will carry the moonwalkers back to the Orion where they'll rejoin their crewmates for the trip back to Earth. Two astronauts will board the HLS for the flight down to the surface, leaving two fellow astronauts behind in lunar orbit. They will fly to the moon in an Orion capsule launched by an SLS rocket and dock with SpaceX's Human Landing System, or HLS, a variant of the Starship upper stage launched atop the company's Super Heavy booster. The Artemis 3 mission, tentatively scheduled for launch in December 2025, will carry astronauts to the lunar surface. The Artemis 2 mission, sending three NASA astronauts and a Canadian flier on a similar around-the-moon shakedown flight, is targeted for late next year. The space agency launched its first Artemis mission last year, sending an unpiloted Orion capsule around the moon and back in the maiden flight of the Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket. "I get a lot of questions, will you make the (moon landing) date? Well, they need to get flying before we can get any kind of assessment," Jim Free, NASA's chief of exploration systems development, told the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board of the National Academies during a meeting Wednesday. An artist's impression of the SpaceX Starship moon lander variant on the lunar surface. ![]() ![]() The company is gearing up for a second test flight, but it's not yet known when that might occur. With the Artemis 3 moon landing mission two-and-a-half years away, SpaceX has launched just one integrated Super Heavy/Starship rocket, and that flight self-destructed before reaching space. NASA continues to target the end of 2025 for the first Artemis astronaut moon landing, but SpaceX faces a daunting number of test flights with its Super Heavy rocket and Starship lunar lander between now and then, raising concerns the flight "probably" will slip into 2026, a top NASA manager says.
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