SpaceX’s milestone Starship rocket flight is likely to happen in 2022

I waited almost two years First orbital flight A new rocket Starship It could finally happen by the end of 2022 – probably in December. That’s the chart drawn up by an official at the US space agency during a live-streamed meeting of NASA’s advisory board in late October. Reuters Commented on October 31.

” We track four major starship flights. The first will be December or early December “, according to Mark Krasich, a NASA official involved in the developmentArtemisThe agency’s space program returns astronauts the moon In the decade of 2020, Starship will play a role in this environment.

However, there is no assurance of an effective launch in the next two months. The company is yet to receive a formal green light from the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for the flight to take off. In June, The FAA lists its requirements for issuing a permitIncluding from an environmental point of view.

SpaceX has not yet clearly satisfied all of the FAA’s demands, or at least, the FAA has yet to process all of the documents, as an administration spokesman said the process is still ongoing. In addition, the American company must continue its tests before flight, In order to ensure correct behavior of the launcher.

Multiple objectives in one task

If the deadline is met, the flight planned for 2022 will in principle be the first flight to fully activate the Starship, i.e. the first stage (named Very heavy), where the main thruster is, and the upper section (called the starship, like the ship as a whole). A starship is a spaceship.

So far, the experiment around the starship is incomplete and has never been so high in the sky. The highest altitude reached during the Starship SN8 test was before December 2020. During that time, the prototype climbed to a height of 12.5 km. Subsequently, several “jumps” were made, reaching heights of 10 km. The starship never reached space beyond 100 km.

SpaceX’s orbital flight with Starship should make it possible to achieve several objectives simultaneously: Overcome this limitation with the external environmentAfter fully testing the rocket and successfully completing an orbital mission, the superheavy will return to its launch point in Texas — with a 90-minute trip for the shuttle to Hawaii.

In the medium term, Starship should replace the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy in SpaceX’s rocket inventory. Larger, more powerful and more versatile, it is also more reusable and more automated. It can send humans to the International Space Station (ISS), but it will also help a future lunar space station.

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