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Soon after SpaceX's successful fourth Starship test flight yesterday, which saw both the booster and the spacecraft successfully soft land in the ocean, Elon Musk shared additional and new details for the test in an interview. Musk regularly engages with the broader spaceflight community and YouTube journalists in the form of social media posts and interviews. This time around, the billionaire executive was talking with Eliana Sheriff from the YouTube channel Ellie in Space. During the talk, Musk revealed that not only did he not expect the second stage Starship to survive reentry after its forward flap caught fire but that the rocket's soft landing was slightly off target.
Elon Musk Is Eager To Try To Catch Starship Super Heavy Booster With Launch Tower In Next FlightAfter yesterday's launch, another YouTuber shared clips of their interview with Musk. This interview, run by Tim Dodd of the YouTube channel Everyday Astronaut, took place before the test flight. The clip saw Musk speculate that one or more of Starship's fins could be vulnerable to fire during re entry. According to him, this is because of the risks of hot gas entering the hinge or the gap between the flap and Starship's body.
Now, Musk's talk with Ellie in Space is the first publicly available interview he's given since yesterday's launch. In this talk, Musk shares that SpaceX hit "two key re usability milestones, which was having the booster boost back to a precise location and execute a landing burn and land softly in the water." Along with the booster, the second milestone saw SpaceX "getting the ship to go all the way through the super high heating of re entry where it's coming in like a meteor and then maintain control sub sonically."
Starship made a controlled reentry, successfully making it through the phases of peak heating and max aerodynamic pressure and demonstrating the ability to control the vehicle using its flaps while descending through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds pic.twitter.com/p8bC9UweLx
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) June 6, 2024
Musk added that while Starship landed in a precise location, the ship was "technically six kilometers off geographically, but it was able to, ship was able to maintain control and then relight the three Raptor engines for landing." Musk was also "surprised" that the flap endured the fire because "once the heat shield tiles are gone, you really just have bare steel, which is mostly the sort of SX300 steel alloy. And it was actually quite surprising how well the steel held up despite the extreme heating."
Not only did Musk think that the flap was not supposed to survive, but, according to him, its performance also validates SpaceX's decision to use steel to make Starship. As for the next flight, he needed to "regroup with the team and confirm that there aren't any other known issues" before deciding whether to catch Super Heavy with the launch tower. However, since the booster "came back, came to a precise location" and executed a "zero velocity landing on the ocean," SpaceX should attempt to catch in on the next flight, believes the executive.
SpaceX's primary objective with Starship is to take crewed missions to Mars. Musk's talk with employees earlier this year saw him share more details about his firm's plan to set up a colony on the red planet. Starship's testing accounts for "development stepping stones to Mars," with the "fundamental breakthrough" needed for "life to become interplanetary is a fully and rapidly reusable rocket," shared Musk. Rapid re usability is the most difficult step on the way to Mars, believes Musk, as "from a technology challenge standpoint," living and surviving on Mars "is small compared to full rapid re usability."
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