The day arrived when SpaceX proved that all those improvements to the launch vehicle had paid off.
Yes, on Thursday, June 6th, Starship's Flight 4, my friends, the newest record-breaking Starship
full stack flew and landed successfully. And oh boy, this incredible scene has improved
dramatically from last time. That landing part just begun,
and you can see the water below, and we have blast zone.
This really shocked the whole aerospace industry, especially the world's largest national agency,
NASA. So what did they discuss about this momentous event? And how will this success
affect the Artemis 3 mission? Find out everything in today's episode of TechMap.
SpaceX launched its fourth Starship rocket flight at 8.50 am ET on Thursday,
for what appears to be its most successful run yet. The unmanned craft is classified as a super
heavy-lift launch vehicle, and is lauded as the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built.
Working toward an ultimate goal of delivering astronauts back and forth between the Earth,
Moon, and even Mars, SpaceX has called each previous test flight an improvement on the last.
The company has been provided millions in funding from NASA in hopes of producing a commercial
rocket that can safely take astronauts to the Moon by 2026. Now, it's time to quickly sum up
everything up to this point. In Raptor's full glory, 32 of 33 booster engines lit as the craft
launched. Roughly three minutes into the flight, the ship successfully began traveling on its own
without the assistance of the booster. After the worth-looking boost-back burn, at 4 minutes and
10 seconds, the hot stage was jettisoned as planned. It's an unparalleled thing that happened.
Around 7 minutes and 20 seconds into the flight, the craft's booster successfully splashed down in
the Gulf of Mexico. All six of Starship's engines powered it into successful orbital insertion.
At 45 minutes and 49 seconds, Ship 29 reached the Kármán line at an altitude of 100 kilometers.
Traveling at more than five times the speed of sound, the plasma around the ship is beginning
to build as it approaches the Earth's atmosphere. And nearly three minutes later,
it approached the peak heating which later burned one of its flaps during descent.
However, this incident cannot prevent the landing burn attempt of the braving ship.
Despite the loss of many tiles and a damaged flap, Starship made it all the way to a soft
landing in the ocean, Elon Musk wrote on X. The test flight made a big bang in the space community
because after three attempts, ultimately both stages of the Starship could make a controlled
re-entry as planned, despite the chaotic ending to the flight test. Congratulations SpaceX on
Starship's successful test flight this morning. We are another step closer to returning humanity
to the Moon through Artemis than looking onward to Mars. NASA's administrator Bill Nelson could
not hide his emotion and shared his thoughts shortly after the impressive test. As the huge
customer and gold sponsor for the Starship program in general, NASA is very satisfied with what
SpaceX has already done in Flight 4. The company has demonstrated excellently the reusability of
this gigantic rocket, which played a key role in the success of Artemis 3. Lisa Watson Morgan,
manager of NASA's human landing system, also previously emphasized her hope to see this
capability in Flight 4. Part of their commercial approach is the reuse of hardware. It's not a
NASA requirement, but it's great that we could potentially see lots and lots of hardware and
rapid turnaround rates. They will have to produce more for us if they don't get their reusability
right, so it's important to them. Starship is dressed in about 18,000 hexagonal heat-absorbing
ceramic tiles to protect its stainless steel structure during re-entry, when temperatures
peak at about 2,600°F, 1,430°C. This time, the fall-off of Starbrick continues to repeat,
but it is totally under the control. We intentionally placed one thin heat shield
tile and removed two tiles completely from the ship to measure how hot things get without tiles
in those locations, while also testing some thermal protection options, SpaceX explained.
With the on-target splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico on this mission, SpaceX could try landing
a super-heavy booster back at the launch pad in Texas as soon as the fifth test flight later this
year. In spite of the harsher conditions of re-entry from orbital velocity, which will take
longer for Starship to reach this level of maturity, Musk believed SpaceX could start
landing ships in Texas next year. The successful ascent and descent also showed that the rocket
went further in replicating the good engine performance it demonstrated on the last two
flights. This is NASA's main interest in the fourth Starship launch. For us primarily, it's
the successful light of those Raptor engines and achieving main stage with all of them on Booster
11, Watson Morgan said. Getting Raptor to where we can consistently see the performance in each
test flight, that's going to give us a good indication that SpaceX and NASA are well on
our way to making all the updates necessary for the HLS lunar landing mission. So, in line with
that, we definitely want to see successful hot staging and then lighting of the Raptors on Ship
29. After Flight 4, SpaceX may come up with an attempt at a Raptor engine restart on the next
Starship test flights. This capability is very important for future Starships to drop out of
orbit and return to Earth, or to head to the Moon and take off from the lunar surface. To guide
Starship toward a controlled re-entry, achieving an in-orbit engine restart should be a prerequisite
for future launches into a stable higher orbit. Thanks to this, the ship can loiter for hours,
days, or weeks deploying satellites and trying to refuel. More than that, there is Starship's
importance to humanity. When Elon Musk initially introduced the Starship concept,
he referred to it as the Mars Colonial Transporter. During the elaboration of the
system at the International Astronautical Congress in September 2016, he revealed a new name,
the Interplanetary Transport System. These earlier designations reflect the spacecraft's primary
purpose of facilitating humanity's expansion into an interplanetary species, a long-standing
aspiration of Musk's. Despite the shifting timelines, Musk envisioned Starship as the
vehicle that will enable the establishment of a sustainable and permanent human presence beyond
Earth. The key breakthrough that could realize this vision is Starship's reusability. This new
system represents the next evolutionary step beyond SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, which already
employs reused boosters. However, the Falcon 9's reusability is limited to the first stage and
payload fairings, with a turnaround time of a few weeks. In contrast, Starship's design
emphasizes full reusability, potentially revolutionizing space travel and allowing
for a more efficient and sustainable exploration of our solar system. Starship is designed to be
fully and rapidly reusable. The rocket's launch tower features two massive chopstick arms designed
to catch Super Heavy as it returns to the launch pad for landing and also to stack a landed Starship
back onto Super Heavy for reflight. This is a revolution compared to the traditional landing
legs. The Super Heavy Starship's initial test flights don't focus on recovery. The goal was to
simply get both stages back to the lower atmosphere intact and under control. During three previous
flights, two in 2023 and the most recent in March, the Super Heavy and Starship stages suffered
catastrophic failures before all the test objectives could be met. But with each flight, SpaceX
implemented hardware and software upgrades that resulted in dramatically improved performance.
In the third test flight, the Starship upper stage made it into space, looped around the planet,
and began a planned descent over the Indian Ocean before breaking up in the upper atmosphere.
The Super Heavy booster made it back into the lower atmosphere over the Gulf of Mexico before
control was lost. But SpaceX hailed the flight as an overall success and made more changes to
improve performance during Thursday's test. While SpaceX's philosophy is to fly frequently,
learn from mistakes, and fly again, NASA will require a long string of successful flights
before the agency will deem it safe to put astronauts aboard. And that just about wraps
it up for today's episode. Thank you, and we look forward to seeing you next time.
