Super Heavy Booster And Ship Perform As Planned

SpaceX’s Starship completed its sixth test flight on November 19 and everything went as planned with the Super Heavy booster and Starship.

The test flight was performed as Super Heavy lifted off the pad with all 33 Raptor engines powering it and Starship to a nominal ascent. Following the stage separation, the booster performed a normal boostback burn to return to the launch site.

This is when the one glitch in the mission emerged: the automated health checks of hardware on the launch and catch tower triggered an abort of the catch attempt. The booster then performed its pre-planned divert with a landing burn and a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.

After the ascent and stage separation, Starship was inserted into its planned suborbital trajectory to test reignition of a single Raptor engine in space. The purpose was to demonstrate the capability of Starship to conduct a deorbit burn in space before starting fully orbital missions. The test was successfully completed when the Raptor engine reignited for a brief moment.

The ship then made it through the reentry and executed a flip to a landing burn and a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

The flight also yielded plenty of data from multiple thermal protection experiments on the spacecraft exterior as well as a successful flight through subsonic speeds at an aggressive angle of attack. That information provides valuable feedback on flight hardware performance in the flight environment to inform adjustments in design or processes as the team aims for reliability and consistency in eventually achieving ship return and catch on every flight.

FMI:  www.spacex.com/