Gizmodo by George Dvorsky 5/17/2021
SpaceX has demonstrated its ability to land Starship, but the company still needs to send the prototype rocket into space and have it survive reentry. Here’s how SpaceX envisions the first orbital test of its futuristic system—and what could go wrong.
With the successful vertical landing of the SN15 prototype on May 5, SpaceX is now looking ahead to the next testing milestone: space itself. On May 13, the company submitted an application to the Federal Communications Commission for a communications license to support an “experimental orbital demo” and “recovery test” of the Starship vehicle following a launch from the SpaceX test facility in Boca Chica, Texas.
Further details were sketched out in an accompanying
attachment. For the first orbital test, a Starship upper stage will be stacked atop a Super Heavy booster (SpaceX has launched the first stage several times already, and landed it once without an explosion, but the Super Heavy is still in development). During the test of the combined Starship launch system, SpaceX will “collect as much data as possible” to “better understand what the vehicle experiences in a flight regime that is extremely difficult to accurately predict or replicate computationally,” according to the filing. In turn, this data will inform possible refinements to the system and allow for better models during subsequent simulations.
More:
https://gizmodo.com/spacex-lays-out-plan-for-first-starship-orbital-test-fl-1846909480
