SpaceX was lucky with SN15, that came with 100s of modifications to it's predecessors as per Elon !
A statement can be made now , Elon Musk backed SpaceX finally achieved the landing of one of its Starship spacecraft prototypes on Wednesday.
This came at a time, when there were open criticism of the contract awarded couple of weeks ago to SpaceX, for landing NASA's Astronauts on the moon.
The Starship spacecraft prototype, known as SN15 (Serial Number 15) , lifted off from SpaceX’s launch site at Boca Chica Village, South Texas, firing its three modified Raptor engines to an altitude of about 6 miles.
It then turned itself sideways in a “free fall” manoeuver and headed back to Earth before righting itself, reigniting its engines and touching down softly.
“The Starship has landed,” John Insprucker, SpaceX principal integration engineer, said during the live broadcast.
Prior to today, another prototype - SN10 had landed at the test site but exploded after few minutes , as it landed harder than expected. So, technically speaking , today marked the second time SpaceX has landed a Starship, this time tasting a success .
Despite previous setbacks, Elon Musk was optimistic about the chances of the SN15 flight and the spacecraft’s ability to make it to orbit , as this one came with numerous modifications.
This success will be a justification , not only for SpaceX but for NASA as well , which was under attack, after awarding SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to ferry it's astronauts to the moon.
This success might have been followed by two other competitors - Blue Origin, the space venture of Jeff Bezos, and Dyentics, a defense contractor, those lost the contract of NASA .
While Musk’s ultimate goal is to use Starship to send people to Mars, he recently said that
“it’s a great honor to be chosen by NASA to return people to the moon. It's been now almost half a century since humans were last on the moon. That's too long. We need to get back there and have … a permanently occupied based on the moon.”
On SpaceX funding , he had quoted,
“And it’s been pretty expensive. As you can tell if you’ve been watching the videos, you know we’ve blown up a few of them. So, excitement guaranteed.”
Starship Users Guide.
Picture and details : SpaceX.
