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Tag: space flight

  • Starship launch: Third flight reaches space but is lost on re-entry

    Starship launch: Third flight reaches space but is lost on re-entry

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    SpaceX's Starship taking off on 14 March

    SpaceX’s Starship taking off on 14 March

    SpaceX

    SpaceX’s third and most ambitious Starship test flight appeared to be at least a partial success today as it reached space, carried out fuel transfer tests and travelled further and faster than ever before. But the craft failed to make its scheduled landing and appears to have either self-destructed or burned up in Earth’s atmosphere.

    After lift-off from SpaceX’s site at Boca Chica, Texas, the first and second stages separated cleanly and the first stage – the booster that lifts it on the first part of its journey – began descending for a landing at sea. SpaceX ultimately intends to recover and re-use both stages, but in these early test flights they are both destined for a safer and easier ocean ditching.

    While the first stage steered itself on the descent it seemingly struggled to slow its fall as intended and appeared to hit the sea at speed.

    The second stage went on to reach an altitude of around 230 kilometres and successfully opened and closed its payload door as a test. It also shuffled fuel from one tank to another as an experimental first step towards the eventual refuelling of one Starship by another, which will be vital for long-range missions.

    But during re-entry the craft reached extremely high temperatures, with live video showing glowing plasma around its surface, and both video and telemetry data was lost.


    The craft had been due to attempt to relight its Raptor engines – which has never been done in space before – for a controlled re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere starting at almost 27,000 kilometres per hour. But this re-light part of the mission was skipped by the company, and the craft was subsequently lost.

    The US Federal Aviation Administration granted permission for the test flight on 13 March, the day before the planned launch, and tweeted that SpaceX had “met all safety, environmental, policy and financial responsibility requirements”.

    Starship is the most powerful rocket ever built. Its 121-metre length is made up of two stages: a booster and a spacecraft, both of which are designed to be reusable to keep costs low and enable fast turnarounds between flights.

    A view of SpaceX's Starship 9 minutes into the mission

    A view of SpaceX’s Starship 9 minutes into the mission

    SpaceX

    Today’s launch was the company’s third with Starship. It follows the first test in April last year, which exploded before the first and second stages could separate, and another in November that saw the second, upper stage reach space but self-destruct when it stopped transmitting data, with the first stage blowing up just after separation.

    The ultimate aim of the project is to put humans on the moon and, later, Mars.

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  • NASA workers paint iconic logo onto Artemis II rocket boosters

    NASA workers paint iconic logo onto Artemis II rocket boosters

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    Workers with NASA???s Exploration Ground Systems (EGS) paint the bright red NASA ???worm??? logo on the side of an Artemis II solid rocket booster segment inside the Rotation, Processing and Surge Facility (RPSF) at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2024. The EGS team used a laser projector to mask off the logo with tape, then painted the first coat of the iconic design. The booster segments will help propel the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket on the Artemis II mission to send four astronauts around the Moon as part of the agency???s effort to establish a long-term science and exploration presence at the Moon, and eventually Mars.

    ART and science merge to spectacular effect in these photos, recently released by NASA. The images amp up anticipation for the upcoming Artemis II mission, which will be NASA’s first crewed space flight beyond low Earth orbit since the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s.

    Last month, NASA workers began the hefty task of painting NASA logos on two solid rocket boosters that will provide vital thrust for the Artemis II mission. Each iconic NASA “worm” is more than 2 metres high and 7 metres from end to end. The image above shows the crew working on the logo at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The logo had been retired, but was brought back in 2020 for select merchandise.

    Artemis II, scheduled for 2025, will involve a four-person crew travelling beyond low Earth orbit (2000 kilometres from the surface or above) and passing around the moon. It will test whether life-support systems are up to the job of more distant space travel.

    The Orion spacecraft for NASA???s Artemis II mission received its latest makeover. Teams adhered the agency???s iconic ???worm??? logo and ESA (European Space Agency) insignia on the spacecraft???s crew module adapter on Sunday, Jan. 28, inside the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building at NASA???s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

    “Under Artemis, we are going to the moon for scientific discovery and exploration and with our long-term goals in mind. We’ll develop the technologies and skills we need to prepare for a future human Mars mission,” says Matt Ramsey, mission manager for Artemis II.

    The image above, also at Kennedy Space Center, shows the latest makeover of the Orion crew capsule of Artemis II – complete with newly added logos. Both Orion and the boosters are pivotal elements for deep space exploration and, crucially, for Artemis’s long-term ambitions for a lunar space station.

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    • space flight/
    • space exploration

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  • Odysseus spacecraft is the first private mission to land on the moon

    Odysseus spacecraft is the first private mission to land on the moon

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    New Scientist Default Image

    A picture taken by the Odysseus spacecraft while in orbit around the moon

    Intuitive Machines

    Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander has touched down on the moon. This is the first time that a private firm has landed a spacecraft on the lunar surface, a welcome success after a recent string of high-profile landing failures by other companies.

    The Odysseus craft launched for this flight, called the IM-1 mission, atop a Falcon 9 rocket on 14 February. It arrived in lunar orbit on 21 February before landing near the south pole of the moon on 22 February.

    The live feed from mission control was tense, as the planned landing time slipped by with no communication from the lander. Eventually, several minutes after Odysseus was supposed to land, mission director Tim Crain in Intuitive Machines’ mission control said, “We’re picking up a signal – it’s faint, but it’s there.”

    The signal showed that the spacecraft had touched down on the moon, but the state of the craft is still unknown. Nevertheless, the landing was a success. “I know this was a nail-biter but we are on the surface,” said Intuitive Machines CEO Stephen Altemus. “Welcome to the moon.”

    Before this landing, three other companies attempted to send landers to the moon. SpaceIL’s Beresheet craft launched in 2019 and ispace’s Hakuto-R mission launched in 2022, but each of them crash-landed and was wrecked.

    Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander didn’t even make it that far after its January launch – a fuel leak forced its operators to return it to Earth to burn up in the atmosphere. With the success of IM-1, Intuitive Machines joins an elite club – only the national space agencies of the Soviet Union, the US, China, India and Japan have successfully landed on the moon before.

    Now that it has landed safely, the second part of the IM-1 mission can begin. Odysseus carried six NASA payloads and six commercial payloads with it to the moon. Some of these, such as devices to assist with the landing and a camera to take photographs of the landing, have already served their purpose. A few have succeeded just by making it to the moon – perhaps most notably a collection of 125 tiny sculptures by artist Jeff Koons. Others, including instruments to measure how the environment around the moon affects its surface, begin their missions now.

    The IM-1 mission is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, through which government contracts are awarded to private companies with the aim of building space flight capabilities through public-private partnerships. Three more lunar landings are planned through CLPS in 2024, one of which is Intuitive Machines’ mission to harvest water ice from the south pole of the moon.

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  • SpaceX aims to let astronauts avoid a radio blackout during re-entry

    SpaceX aims to let astronauts avoid a radio blackout during re-entry

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    An artist's impression of Orion re-entering Earth's atmosphere

    Artist’s impression of the uncrewed Orion capsule re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. The real thing returned safely to Earth in 2022

    NASA

    SpaceX is about to test a system aimed at overcoming the communications blackout that happens when a spacecraft re-enters Earth’s atmosphere from orbit.

    Almost every spacecraft that has returned to Earth has suffered a break in communications during re-entry as the atmosphere slows it down. The same friction that decelerates the spacecraft also heats the air below the craft until it ionises into a glowing, conductive plasma. This quickly forms a…

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