For Spacex, 2025 should have been the best year.
Elon Musk, the founder of private space society, is one of the most influential people in the oval office and President Trump has approved his vision of sending humans to Mars.
But so far it hasn’t been a great year for Rocket Company. The vehicle that is at the center of Mars’s goal, the gigantic spacex starship rocket, was launched twice this year and twice jumped into the air.
The last explosion occurred on Thursday during the eighth space of spaceship, less than two months after the seventh test flight separated in space. Once again, a shower of debris rained, creating a new headache for travelers in Florida and the Caribbean who were not used to seeing “space debris” as a reason for flight delays. Neither accidents wounded anyone.
The explosions are not necessarily failures for a company that has thrived on a mentality of “throwing it, breaking it, solving it, launching again”. With innovations such as landing and reuse of rockets, Spacex cut the cost of sending things into space. The spaceship, designed to be completely reusable, has the potential to overturn the rocket activity again.
But these two explosions of spaceships were a step back in the Spacex development process, since flights could not even repeat the successes of the previous test flights, and perhaps show that the company’s engineers are not as infallible as the fans of the company sometimes love to think.
“There is this person who has accumulated around Spacex, but you are starting to see that they are also human,” said Daniel Dumbacher, a former NASA official who is now a professor of engineering practice at Purdue University and Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer for special aerospace services, an engineering and manufacturing company whose customers include the NASA, United and the strength of Spacex.
The delays could also have repercussions for NASA, which has taken Spacex to use a version of Starship for the land of the astronauts on the Moon as soon as 2027 during the Artemis III mission.
The two lost spaceships, which both failed less than 10 minutes after take -off, were an updated design. Scoating, they had less success than a previous version of Starship that flew last year. Three previous test flights are forced halfway all over the world, they survived to return to the atmosphere on the Indian Ocean and then simulated the landings in the waters off the western coast of Australia.
In addition, the failures of the seventh and eighth flights occurred in the same part of the flight, and both seemed to have originated near the engines of the spatial vehicle of the second stage. This suggests that Spacex has not diagnosed and successfully solved the problem. It could indicate a significant design defect in the updated spaceship.
This also means that Spacex has so far not been able to test the aspects of the updated spaceship design, including smaller and more repositioned wings forward used to drive the space vehicle while falling into the air during the return. Spacex has also planned to test a distributor similar to Pez for the distribution of his internet Starlink satellites.
The spaceship, the most powerful rocket ever built, is fundamental for the dreams of Mr. Musk to build human settlements on Mars. A frequent cadence of astronavian launches is also crucial for the most immediate floors of Spacex to make money.
The next generation of satellites for its Internet-Saces Starlink internet service is larger and heavier. The voluminous loading space of the upper phase of astronave would allow the company to fill its constellation of thousands of satellites in orbit quickly and economicly.
Test flight failures also mean that Spacex’s development program has not been able to move on to other objectives.
Spacex must demonstrate that the spaceship can remain in orbit for a long period of time, then abandon the orbit and return to the launch site to be captured by the mechanical arms on the launch tower. (The Super Heavy Booster phase, which does not go to orbit, has done it successfully three times). The company must also demonstrate that it can launch several astronavians in rapid succession.
More critically, it must demonstrate that it can move liquid oxygen and propellers methane from one spaceship to another. This procedure is the key to allowing a spaceship to accumulate enough fuel to go to Moon or Mars.
Therefore, the spaceship that must reach the moon will have to remain in terrestrial orbit when other spaceships are launched to bring out propellers to fill the tanks armed with Starship Lunar Lander.
Musk said that propellant transfer is a simple exercise. But pumping so much liquid so quickly while floating in orbit has never been tempted, and nobody still knows how many spaceship titles – perhaps up to 20 – will be necessary for a single lunar mission.
“We do not know what the performance of the tank will be like,” said Amit Kshatriya, a associated deputy administrator for the Moon To Mars program of NASA in December, in December in a media event focused on Artemis at the Kennedy Space Center of NASA in Florida. “Simply not.”
At the time, Mr. Kshatriya said that NASA would learn that soon, because the long -lasting version of Starship should have launched in the spring. So Spacex could also test his ability to operate two spaceships simultaneously in orbit and determine how efficient the propellers between two space vehicles can move.
These discoveries, in turn, would help NASA to put together a realistic program for Artemis III.
Within a year, “let’s go to a good understanding of this problem,” said Kshatriya. “But I can’t plan that innovation. There is no way to do it. “
But the Mr. Kshatrya program described assumption that there would be no important setbacks. With the Federal Aviation Administration Grounding Starship until Spacex does not complete an investigation into the failure of flight 8, the debut of the long -lasting astronave can be delayed in the middle of the year or more.
Dumbacher thinks that Spacex will be able to solve the technical challenges placed by the spaceship. “I have no doubts that they will face it, and will make you fly again and make things repair,” he said. “I don’t know how long it will take to do it.”
In the testimony of a Chamber Committee last month, Dumbacher said that the spaceship system, with the multitude of food flights, was too large and too complicated to satisfy the current 2027 date target for Artemis III, or even 2030, when China has planned to land astronauts on the moon.
Dumbacher has even proposed that NASA passed to a smaller and easier Lander to improve the possibilities that NASA can win the race for the 21st century moon with China. Since Spacex should conduct a demonstration of his Lander for astronavians without astronauts on board before Artemis III, a successful astronaut who lands on the moon using the spaceship could request a good 40 launches.
He did not consider the possibilities that many successful launches are high. “I have to reduce that number of drastically launches,” said Dumbacher during the hearing. “I have to become simple.”