NASA officials say the third test flight of SpaceX's Starship vehicle has achieved “several important first steps” on the long road to landing astronauts on the moon, but there is still much work to be done.
The Starship spacecraft successfully flew into space yesterday (March 14) from SpaceX's Starbase site in south Texas and reached orbital speed, among other accomplishments. NASA particularly praised Starship's spacecraft's propellant transfer demonstration, which will be important for future lunar missions managed by NASA's Artemis program. However, engineers need to review the data in the coming weeks to see how successful the test flight was.
“With each flight test, SpaceX is trying to achieve increasingly ambitious goals for Starship to learn as much as possible in order to develop future mission systems,” said Lisa Watson Morgan, Human Landing Systems (HLS) program manager at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. A March 14 Agency statement.
“The ability to test key systems and processes…allows both NASA and SpaceX to collect critical data needed for the continued development of the Starship HLS,” Watson-Morgan added. Starship is the HLS company tasked by NASA with landing astronauts on the Moon during Artemis 3, which is now scheduled to launch no later than September 2026.
Related: Enjoy SpaceX Starship's third flight experience in stunning images
SpaceX attempted to transfer fuel in space from one Starship tank to another, and both SpaceX and NASA will review flight data in the coming weeks to see how well that worked. NASA officials wrote that the fuel is extremely cool, and engineers want to ensure that the spacecraft's stability in space is not unnecessarily affected by the process.
The agency added that engineers will also seek to make the transportation process as efficient as possible by examining “the movement of liquid within the tanks” with the aim of “ensuring [Starship’s] “The Raptor engines receive the necessary propulsive conditions to support in-orbit restart.”
However, during the Starship test flight yesterday, the vehicles' rotation rates during the coastal phase forced engineers to abandon “the planned on-orbit relighting of a single Raptor engine,” SpaceX wrote in a letter. Task summary.
SpaceX is promising fast flights with Starship soon, with four other 400-foot (122-meter) vehicles already built in anticipation of test flights in the coming months. One of these spaceships has already undergone a static fire test this week, SpaceX space operations engineer Siva Bharadvaj said during yesterday's launch broadcast.
However, NASA says it wants repeat successes before putting astronauts on board the spacecraft. In June 2023, for example, Jim Frey, an agency official, said SpaceX would have to wrap up “a significant number of launches” before Artemis program activities. NASA has also raised concerns about the pace of spacecraft development several times in recent months.
Artemis 3 was postponed in January of this year to a September 2026 launch, roughly a year later than its previous target, partly due to the slow pace of Starship development and partly due to various technical issues with NASA's Orion spacecraft, special synthetic spacesuits and other Important items. However, last month, NASA highlighted success in tests of the Starship docking system and said SpaceX had completed “more than 30 specific HLS accomplishments” on various pieces of hardware.
SpaceX is not the only supplier to HLS; Blue Origin has a contract with NASA for lunar landing services as well. SpaceX was initially and unexpectedly selected as the sole 2021 winner for the HLS contracts, after NASA pledged to select multiple suppliers. In response to competitors' protests, the GAO found no “competitive bias” in NASA's decision. But in October 2021, the US Senate directed NASA to choose a second company, and the agency ultimately chose Blue Origin for its Blue Moon landing system.
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