By MATTHEW PHELAN SENIOR SCIENCE REPORTER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
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Elon Musk’s SpaceX will conduct its sixth test flight with the private space company’s massive Starship — a reusable rocket that Musk hopes will one day carry humans to the moon and Mars.
During Tuesday’s mission, the 400-foot-tall spacecraft will be stacked atop the 230-foot-tall Super Heavy booster, which will lift off from Boca Chica, Texas, sometime between the 5:00 PM and 5:30 PM ET launch window.
DailyMail.com will cover the proceedings below as SpaceX’s own livestream for Starship Flight 6 goes live about a half hour before the launch window opens, approximately around 4:30 PM Eastern.
While spectators are expected to crowd around SpaceX’s massive rocket development site in Boca Chica, Texas, viewers at home can watch the launch live via webcast on the SpaceX page on XMusk’s new X TV app or via the live feed below. Check out DailyMail.com’s primer on the Starship launch for more details.
Starship’s Super Heavy booster could crash into the Gulf of Mexico as a fail safe
SpaceX told the press that, if conditions are not ideal, the Super Heavy booster will follow a trajectory that will force it to crash safely into the Gulf of Mexico.
The company said the booster’s return to the launch pad will only occur if conditions are right to ensure the safety of the public and the SpaceX team.
Ideally, however, this afternoon’s launch will provide valuable data on the specifics of the ‘chopstick’ return to the launch pad.
Musk has said that “thousands of small design changes have been made [are] is also being tested,” although he did not specify what those changes are.
But according to SpaceX itself, the company hopes to further observe and improve its hardware and software performance, based on data collected during this test, to “increase structural strength in key areas and shorten the timeline to offload propellants from the booster after a successful test’. catch.’
What exactly is being launched today? Here you can read what you should pay attention to
In its current iteration, Starship is a two-stage reusable space vehicle and the largest and most powerful rocket ever built.
Musk boasted that his spacecraft is now “more than twice as powerful as the Saturn V moon rocket,” which launched NASA’s Apollo 4 mission in 1967.
Consisting of the Starship top step and the Super heavy booster, this version of Starship is powered by six engines: three regular ‘Raptor’ engines and three Raptor Vacuum (RVac) engines, tailor-made by the team at SpaceX for the unique needs of operating in the vacuum of space.
The Super Heavy booster, which will help the spacecraft break free from Earth’s atmosphere, is powered by 33 Raptor engines, with 13 in the center and another 20 around the perimeter of the rear or aft end of the booster -rocket.
These countless individual boosters will pop in a delicate dance to hold the reusable craft’s now famous “chopstick” landing.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk sets the tone with a reference to JRR Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’
Musk has set an epic fantasy tone for his sixth Starship test launch.
The billionaire mogul posted a photo of a pair of launch scaffolds used to keep the spacecraft stable during liftoff, with an allusion to Tolkien’s second “Lord of the Rings” novel, “The Two Towers.”
Tolkien has never been publicly clear about which of the five towers in this fantasy novel is directly referenced by his book’s title, and it’s even less clear here what subtext Musk is trying to convey.
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