The tension is at its peak at SpaceX. It must be said that Elon Musk’s company will experience a decisive moment on Monday. She must indeed attempt the first test flight of Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket in the world, intended for trips to the Moon and Mars.
The takeoff of this giant is scheduled for around 8 a.m. (3 p.m. in Paris) from the Starbase space base, in the far south of Texas in the United States. The weather forecast is favorable.
Twice the power of Saturn V
From its height of 120 meters, Starship belongs to the category of super-heavy launchers, capable of transporting more than 100 tons of cargo into orbit. Its take-off power must be more than twice that of the legendary Saturn V, the Apollo lunar program rocket (111 meters).
The machine, which runs on liquid oxygen and methane, has never flown in its full configuration, with its super-powerful first stage, called Super Heavy. Only the second stage of the vehicle, the Starship spacecraft which by extension gives its name to the entire rocket, carried out suborbital tests (at an altitude of around 10 km).
On Monday, the flight plan is as follows: approximately three minutes after takeoff, Super Heavy is to detach and fall back into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The Starship must then continue its ascent on its own, and complete a little less than a circumnavigation of the Earth before falling back into the Pacific Ocean.
But this is the “best case scenario”, SpaceX said, as the outcome of the test is uncertain. “If we see anything that worries us, we will postpone the flight,” Elon Musk warned on Twitter on Sunday. And if takeoff is attempted, he just wished he didn’t destroy the launch pad. His fear: that one of Super Heavy’s 33 Raptor engines would explode and cause a “domino effect” by spreading to the others. “It would surely take several months to rebuild the launch pad if we melt it down,” he said. “If we get far enough away from the launch pad before there is a problem, I will consider that a success. »
A reusable rocket
This inaugural flight will undoubtedly be followed very closely by NASA. The agency has indeed chosen this vessel to land its astronauts on the Moon for the first time in more than half a century, during the Artemis 3 mission officially scheduled for 2025.
In the future, the rocket must also be fully reusable in order to cut prices. Super Heavy will have to return to his launch tower, equipped with arms to catch him. The Starship will have to return to land on Earth using retrorockets. It was this maneuver that had been attempted several times in 2020 and 2021. Several prototypes had then descended too quickly, and had hit the ground in impressive explosions, before one of them finally succeeded in landing.