There are plenty of reasons to be excited about Tuesday’s (May 19) planned test flight of SpaceX’s Starship megarocket.
To start, it will be the first release of starship – the largest and most powerful rocket ever built – in almost seven months. And while the mission will be Starship’s 12th overall, it will mark the debut of the new, advanced V3 vehicle, which features a number of important modifications and updates compared to its predecessors. (That helps explain the long gap in the release.)
Finally, while Starship will fly a familiar suborbital trajectory on Flight 12, it will do something completely new while it’s there: Take a good, long look at yourself.
The Flight 12 plan calls for Starship’s upper stage, known as Ship, to deploy 22 dummy versions of SpaceX. Star Link broadband spaceship. These will be “similar in size to next-generation Starlink satellites,” SpaceX wrote in a Flight 12 Mission Description.
That’s an important detail: SpaceX has said that one of Starship’s main tasks when it comes online will be to finish building the Starlink megaconstellation. (Other key jobs will be transporting astronauts to the lunar surface for NASA’s program artemis program and help establish a colony in Mars.)
That number marks a considerable increase over previous Starlink flights, during which Ship has carried eight or 10 such massive simulators. And there’s another important difference, too: the fictional Starlink Flight 12 batch includes two inspector spacecraft.
“The last two satellites “The deployment will scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit images to operators to test methods of analyzing Starship’s heat shield readiness to return to the launch site on future missions,” SpaceX wrote in the mission description. “Several tiles on Starship have been painted white to simulate missing tiles and serve as imaging targets in the test.”
This focus on heat shielding shouldn’t come as a big surprise. After all, protecting returning spacecraft from the intense heat and other rigors of atmospheric reentry is a difficult task, as we learned in the run-up to NASA’s mission. Artemis 2 lunar mission with all discussion on the heat shield of the Orion capsule.
And protecting Starship is much more difficult, given that the vehicle is designed to be completely and quickly reusable. The heat shield on each Orion capsule has to do its job only once, but each Ship vehicle will eventually launch and return to Land several times a day, if everything goes according to plan.
In fact, the founder and CEO of SpaceX Elon Musk has pointed to the ship’s heat shield, which consists of some 40,000 hexagonal plates, as the biggest obstacle facing the vehicle at the moment.
“The biggest remaining problem for Starship? Is making the heat shield reusable,” Musk said in February. on the Dwarkesh podcast.
“No one has ever made a reusable orbital heat shield,” he added. “So the heat shield has to get through the climb phase without shedding a bunch of tiles, and then it has to come back in and also not shedding a bunch of tiles or overheating the main structure of the plane.”
The ship’s heat shield has done its job before; the vehicle has survived the trip back to Earth and splashed gently in the ocean on multiple previous test flights. But improvements will be needed to get Starship where SpaceX wants it to go, according to Musk.
The ship lost a lot of tokens during those previous flights, so “it couldn’t be reused without a lot of work,” the world’s richest person said on the podcast. “If you want to be able to land, refuel and fly again, you can’t do this laborious inspection of 40,000 tiles.”
If all goes as planned Tuesday, Starship’s first stage, a giant booster called Super Heavy, will head toward a controlled landing in the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after liftoff. (There will be no drama reinforcement capture by the “stick” type arms of the launch tower, as we have seen on several previous flights).
Meanwhile, the ship will land in the Indian Ocean about 65 minutes after launch, as it has done several times before. But before that we should get some new views into heat shield space, which will give us some real-time clues about how the harrowing re-entry may unfold.
