Hey everybody, welcome back to the Elon Musk Podcast. This is a show where we discuss the critical crossroads that shape SpaceX, Tesla X, The Boring Company and Neuralink. I'm your host Will Walden Space XS Starship rocket launched successfully from Starbase in Texas. This marks the 4th test flight aimed at missions to the Moon and to Mars in the future. This rocket is 400 feet tall and it flew over the Gulf of Mexico. It achieved a controlled
splashdown. This marks the longest and most successful flight for Starship to date. Now, another thing that happened which was very cool is Spacex's Super Heavy booster did a soft landing successfully in the Gulf of Mexico, which is an important milestone for the company. Now, the Starship, known as the most powerful launch vehicle ever built, completed its fourth test flight with a successful landing, burn, and splashdown by the booster.
This flight received approval from the FAA and included upgrades and software changes to enhance performance. Now, despite some of these challenges in the Starship lineup, the flight was successful, showcasing the rocket's resilience and the potential for future space exploration to the moon and beyond.
Now for the first time, both elements of the nearly 400 foot tall rocket launched successfully from Spacex's Starbase facility near Brownsville, TX and return to Earth for controlled splashdowns at sea. This demonstration paves the way for future Starship test flights. They'll bring the booster and eventually the upper stage back to land at Starbase for rapid
reusability. Now the two stage rocket took off from Starbase it's 7:50 AM CDT and headed E over the Gulf of Mexico with more than £15,000,000 of thrust, roughly twice the power of NASA's Saturn 5 rocket from the Apollo lunar program of the 1960s and 70s. And the success of the flight is crucial for SpaceX as it aims to develop a fully reusable transportation system for crew and cargo to Earth orbit the Moon, to Mars, and into the outer solar system.
Now, NASA also has a significant interest in Starship success because the agency selected it to serve as a human rated lunar Lander for the Artemis program, which aims to ferry astronauts to and from the surface of the moon. However, dozens more Starship flights will be necessary before it can carry astronauts, likely not before the latter part of this decade. Now the 4th flight of Starship made major strides to bring us closer to a rapidly reusable future, said SpaceX on its website.
Also said its accomplishments will provide data to drive improvements as we continue rapidly developing Starship into a fully reusable transportation system designed to carry crew and cargo to Earth orbit the Moon, Mars and beyond. Now this flight was the 4th launch of a full size Starship rocket and was the first to end with the booster in the ship reaching Earth's surface in one piece. While it wasn't perfect, the flight success cannot be
overstated. The payload for this test was the data says SpaceX in Starship delivered. The launch involved two of the 33 methane fueled Raptor engines of the Super Heavy booster, failing one on ascent and 1:00 during the boosters final breaking burn just before splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. And despite these failures, the remaining engines guided the booster to a gentle splashdown after a vertical descent just off the coast of Starbase about 7 1/2 minutes after liftoff.
Engineers identified a filter blockage in the lines feeding liquid oxygen propellant into the Raptor engines as the cause of the landing failure in March. However, this did not appear to be a significant issue. On Thursday, SpaceX also made another change to the booster descent by jettisoning the Rockets hot staging ring where the Starship's upper stage attaches to the Super Heavy booster for launch.
The Starship's upper stages 6 Raptor engines burned a few seconds longer than planned to compensate for the boosters performance shortfall. This adjustment put the ship on the proper suborbital trajectory, reaching a peak altitude of 132 miles before Earth's gravity pulled the 160 foot long vehicle back into the atmosphere around 47 minutes
after launch. During Spacex's third Starship test flight in March, the scorching heat of re entry destroyed the rocket as it descended into the upper asses here over the Indian Ocean. Clogged thrusters caused the ship to lose control of its orientation, leading to its destruction, but this time, Starship maintained control
throughout the flight. Dazzling live views from cameras aboard the rocket, relayed to the ground through Spacex's Starlink broadband network, showed purple and orange plasma pouring over the vehicle as it glided through the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean. And although some ceramic thermal protection tiles peeled away, the damage control flap still functioned, allowing the vehicle to maintain control
during re entry. Starship made a controlled re entry, 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. These were mission objectives as outlined by Elon Musk before the
launch. Finally, three of the Raptor engines on Starship reignited, flipping the rocket from a belly down orientation to a vertical position a few 100 feet above the Indian Ocean. Despite these challenges, the rocket managed a soft landing in the ocean. And despite loss of many tiles at a damage flap, Starship made it all the way to a soft landing in the ocean. Congratulations to SpaceX on an epic achievement.
Now SpaceX employees celebrated at the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, CA. It was a little bit of use your imagination as you were going down with what we could actually see, but we were able to hear the ship do its landing burn, said a spokesperson for SpaceX during the flight. And Starship made it through re entry and did its first ever landing burn from South Texas to the other side of the Earth.
Starship is in the water. SpaceX engineers were particularly interested in observing Starship's heat shield performance during Thursday's flight. The thermal barrier consists of around 18,000 hexagonal ceramic tiles, similar to those used on NASA space shuttle temperatures during re entry can reach 2600 Fahrenheit. Now that's hot enough to melt aluminum, a metal commonly used in launch vehicles. Engineers selected a stainless steel alloy for Starship's primary construction.
This material, though heavier than aluminum or carbon fiber, is strong at cryogenic temperatures, an important characteristic because Starship consumes methane and liquid oxygen chilled to several 100° below 0. Stainless steel also has a higher melting temperature than other materials commonly used in rockets. For a reusable ship, you're coming in like a meteor. You want something that does not melt at a low temperature. You want something that melts at a high temperature.
And this is where steel is extremely good as well. Now looking ahead, the 5th test flight of Starship could occur within a couple of months. The FAA ordered mishap investigations following the 1st 3 Starship launches, but this likely won't be necessary this time. SpaceX has already test fired the ship for the next flight, and the booster could be hot fired soon.
The successful soft splashdown of a Super Heavy booster in the Gulf of Mexico has made Musk confident enough to aim for an onshore landing next time, he said. I think we should try to catch the booster with the Mechazilla arms next flight. We'll see how that works out. Other priorities for the next phase of Starship testing include demonstrating the ability to restart a Raptor engine in space. This capability is crucial for putting Starship into a stable low Earth orbit and guiding it
back for reentry. Now, once in orbit, Starship could deploy Starlink Internet satellites and perform refueling tests necessary for SpaceX to fulfill NASA's lunar Lander contract. Now, SpaceX may also make changes to the Starship heat shield to address the loss of tiles encountered on Flight 4. Engineers will investigate the reasons behind the two Raptor engine failures during the launch and landing of the booster, aiming to refine the design and improve future flights reliability.
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