SpaceX's Starship's Fourth Test Flight

TapTechNews June 6 news, SpaceX's Starship under Elon Musk ignited and lifted off, which also means it started its fourth test flight.

The rocket has been launched. The picture shows that one engine failed to start normally during launch, but since the Starship has redundancy of about 3 engines in design, the Starship can still take off normally for now.

In this test flight, the Starship has to complete a tricky main goal: surviving the extremely high temperature stage when re-entering the Earth and passing through the atmosphere. In the last test flight, the Starship disintegrated at this intense high temperature penetration stage.

SpaceX said that the focus of this test flight is no longer to enter the orbit, but to show the recovery ability of the Starship and the super-heavy rocket. The main goal will be to use the super-heavy booster to conduct a landing burn and soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico and achieve the controlled entry of the Starship. In order to achieve this goal, SpaceX has carried out many software and hardware upgrades to improve the overall reliability.

The flight path of this test flight is similar to that of the previous test, and the goal is to splash in the Indian Ocean. This flight path does not require an off-orbit burn to re-enter the atmosphere, maximizing public safety, while still having the opportunity to achieve SpaceX's main goal, that is, the controlled re-entry of the spacecraft.

The Starship is the tallest and strongest rocket ever made by humans, with a height of 120 meters (about 394 feet), consisting of a 70-meter (about 230 feet) high super-heavy booster equipped with 33 Raptor engines at the bottom and a 50-meter (about 164 feet) high reusable spaceship cabin at the top. Its earth orbit payload capacity exceeds 100 tons (about 220,462 pounds) and can send cargo and astronauts to earth orbit, the moon, Mars and even farther into deep space.