SpaceX’s plans for first orbital test flight of its latest spacecraft revealed in public document

17th May 2021

By: Rebecca Campbell

Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

     

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US private-sector space company SpaceX, founded and led by South African-born engineer and entrepreneur Elon Musk, is planning to carry out the first orbital flight of its latest spaceship, designated Starship, during the second half of this year. This has been reported by US journal Space News, which noticed a May 13 filing to the US Federal Communications Commission by the company.

SpaceX is applying for a special temporary licence for the communications that would be a necessary part of the test flight. The application described the proposed mission as an “experimental orbital demo and recovery test of the Starship test vehicle”. The launch would be from the company’s Starbase facility, near the small Texan town of Boca Chica, in the US.

The test flight would (all being well) take place sometime during a six-month ‘window’, starting on June 20. It would see the Starship test vehicle launched by SpaceX’s latest rocket, the Super Heavy, which, unlike the Starship, has not yet flown. Starship test vehicles have undertaken five suborbital flights so far, of which the last, carried out early this month, was the first fully successful one.

“SpaceX intends to collect as much data as possible during [the] flight to quantify entry dynamics and better understand what the vehicle experiences in a flight regime that is extremely difficult to predict or replicate computationally,” explained the application. “This data will anchor any changes in vehicle design or [operational concept] after the first flight and build better models for us to use in our internal simulations.”

The application outlines the plan for this test flight. The Super Heavy rocket would shut down its engines 169 seconds after launch, and the Starship would separate from it two seconds later (171 seconds after launch). Super Heavy would then drop down to make a landing 495 seconds after launch, in the Gulf of Mexico, some 32 km offshore. The document does not state whether it would land on a platform or a ship or splash down into the sea.

Meanwhile, the Starship would ignite its engines five seconds after separating from the Super Heavy (176 seconds after launch) and then shut them down 521 seconds after launch, having entered orbit. However, it would not complete a full orbit before it re-entered the atmosphere, to splash down in the Pacific Ocean some 100 km north west of the Hawaiian island of Kauai.

Space News cited Musk’s explanation for this type of landing during this first orbital flight, given in a tweet. “We need to make sure [the] ship won’t break up on re-entry, hence deorbit over Pacific,” he stated. In operation, both the Starship and Super Heavy would be re-usable.

The journal pointed out, however, that SpaceX still needed to obtain a licence from the Office of Commercial Space Transportation of the US Federal Aviation Administration before it could launch the Super Heavy rocket from Starbase. The granting of this licence was, in turn, dependent on the outcome of an environmental impact assessment (EIA) regarding launching the Super Heavy/Starship combination from the facility. The EIA is currently under way. The current EIA covers only launches of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.

Edited by Creamer Media Reporter

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