Like the SN8, SpaceX starship SN9 crashes during the landing after the pre-test flight. The testing happened on 3:25 PM EST in the South Texas site. During the flight, the 50-metres tall Starship flew about 10 km and did a horizontal flip similar to its predecessor the SN8. And it’s sad to say that like its predecessor the SN9 couldn’t nail the landing.
Failure of the SN9
It is obvious that when landing the Starship needs to be very stable and at the perfect speed. But during the SN9 launch test, the starship wasn’t able to slow down adequately, which resulted in an explosion. I did feel that though both the SN8 and SN9 crashes, the former landed a little better while the SN9 looked more out of control. Do note that this is while just looking at the live launch and nothing technical.
The launch was perfect; everything went well except for the landing part, which is one of the most difficult things to perfect. After the failure of the launch event, the principal integration engineer of Space said, “Again, we’ve just got to work on that landing a little bit”. He also said that even though the rocket crashed the launch was great for the most part. One of the integral parts was the subsonic re-entry which went great and gave them a lot of data.
SpaceX’s final starship goals
Once the company develops a perfect starship that lands perfectly, we can be sure about going to Mars. This is actually the primary goal behind Starship development. Talking about the final starship by the company, it will have 6 raptor engines. At the same time, the super-heavy rocket that will take the starship to outer space will have 30 engines. This is because the Earth’s gravitational pull is strong. But for Moon and Mars, the starship will be powerful enough to do liftoffs on its own.
FAA and SpaceX’s clash!
After SpaceX violated its launch license with the launch of the SN8 rocket, the FAA has been high in its heels. It has been closely monitoring the working of SpaceX and has delayed the launch of the SN9 too. The government body says that it’s their duty to make sure that the launches are safe and it doesn’t affect the public. So, unless they are sure of that, giving launch permissions to SpaceX won’t be possible. After the recent crash of the SN9, the FAA again talked about investigating what might have gone wrong.
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