SpaceX’s mega rocket Starship lifts off from Starbase for a test flight on Sunday (October 13, 2024), in Boca Chica, Texas
| Photo Credit: AP

SpaceX launched its enormous Starship rocket on Sunday (October 13, 2024) on its boldest test flight yet, catching the returning booster back at the pad with mechanical arms.

Towering almost 400 feet (121 meters), the empty Starship blasted off at sunrise from the southern tip of Texas near the Mexican border. It arced over the Gulf of Mexico like the four Starships before it that ended up being destroyed, either soon after liftoff or while ditching into the sea. The last one in June was the most successful yet, completing its flight without exploding.

This time, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk upped the challenge and risk. The company brought the first-stage booster back to land at the pad from which it had soared seven minutes earlier. The launch tower sported monstrous metal arms, dubbed chopsticks, that caught the descending 232-foot (71-meter) booster.

“Are you kidding me?” SpaceX’s Dan Huot observed with excitement from near the launch site. “I am shaking right now.”

“This is a day for the engineering history books,” added SpaceX’s Kate Tice from SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

It was up to the flight director to decide, in real time with a manual control, whether to attempt the landing. SpaceX said both the booster and launch tower had to be in good, stable condition. Otherwise, it was going to end up in the gulf like the previous ones. Everything was judged to be ready for the catch.

Once free of the booster, the retro-looking stainless steel spacecraft on top continued around the world, targeting a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean. The June flight came up short at the end after pieces came off. SpaceX upgraded the software and reworked the heat shield, improving the thermal tiles.

SpaceX has been recovering the first-stage boosters of its smaller Falcon 9 rockets for nine years, after delivering satellites and crews to orbit from Florida or California. But they land on floating ocean platforms or on concrete slabs several miles from their launch pads — not on them.

Recycling Falcon boosters has sped up the launch rate and saved SpaceX millions. Musk intends to do the same for Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built with 33 methane-fuel engines on the booster alone. NASA has ordered two Starships to land astronauts on the moon later this decade. SpaceX intends to use Starship to send people and supplies to the moon and, eventually Mars.

Washington:

The SpaceX crew that will ferry back two astronauts stranded on the International Space Station docked with the orbiting laboratory Sunday, a live stream of the mission showed.

The Falcon 9 rocket took off at 1:17 pm (1717 GMT) from Cape Canaveral, Florida on Saturday, with the Crew-9 mission on a Dragon spacecraft making contact with the ISS at 5:30 pm Sunday.

After docking was completed, NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov boarded the station just after 7:00 pm, embracing their floating colleagues on the space station.

“What a fabulous day it was today,” NASA deputy administrator Pam Melroy said at a news conference.

When Hague and Gorbunov return from the space station in February, they will bring back two space veterans — Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — whose stay on the ISS was prolonged for months due to problems with their Boeing-designed Starliner spacecraft. 

The newly developed Starliner was making its first crewed flight when it delivered Wilmore and Williams to the ISS in June.

Welcome, #Crew9! After floating through the Dragon’s hatch, our new arrivals join the crew aboard the @Space_Station. They’ll spend five months conducting @ISS_Research and maintenance on the orbiting lab. pic.twitter.com/DJX7f9vxlg

— NASA (@NASA) September 29, 2024

They were supposed to be there for only an eight-day stay, but after problems with the Starliner’s propulsion system emerged during the flight there, NASA was forced to weigh a radical change in plans.

After weeks of intensive tests on the Starliner’s reliability, the space agency finally decided to return it to Earth without its crew, and to bring the two stranded astronauts back home on SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission.

SpaceX, the private company founded by billionaire Elon Musk, has been flying regular missions every six months to allow the rotation of ISS crews.

But the launch of Crew-9 was postponed from mid-August to late September to give NASA experts more time to evaluate the reliability of the Starliner and decide how to proceed.  

It was then delayed a few more days by the destructive passage of Hurricane Helene, a powerful storm that roared into the opposite side of Florida on Thursday.

In total, Hague and Gorbunov will spend some five months on the ISS; and Wilmore and Williams, eight months.

In all, Crew-9 will conduct some 200 scientific experiments. 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Washington:

The SpaceX Polaris Dawn mission, which made history when its crew conducted the first spacewalk by non-government astronauts, splashed down off the coast of Florida early Sunday.

The Dragon spacecraft landed in the ocean at 3:37 am (0737 GMT), a webcast of the splashdown showed, with a recovery team deploying in the pre-dawn darkness to retrieve the capsule and crew.

The four-member team led by fintech billionaire Jared Isaacman launched Tuesday from the Kennedy Space Center, quickly journeying deeper into the cosmos than any humans in the past half century as they ventured into the dangerous Van Allen radiation belt.

Watch the @PolarisProgram‘s Polaris Dawn astronauts return to Earth aboard Dragon → https://t.co/WpSw0gzeT0https://t.co/wC8cUNSBie

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 15, 2024

They hit a peak altitude of 870 miles (1,400 kilometres) — more than three times higher than the International Space Station and the furthest humans had ever travelled from Earth since the Apollo missions to the Moon.

Then on Thursday, with their Dragon spacecraft’s orbit brought down to 434 miles, Isaacman swung open the hatch and climbed out into the void, gripping a structure called “Skywalker” as a breathtaking view of Earth unfolded before him. 

“SpaceX, back at home we all have a lot of work to do, but from here, Earth sure looks like a perfect world,” he told mission control in Hawthorne, California, where teams erupted in applause.

He went back inside after a few minutes and was replaced by a second astronaut, SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis, who, like Isaacman, performed a series of mobility tests on SpaceX’s sleek, next-generation suits.

Since Dragon doesn’t have an airlock, the entire crew were exposed to the vacuum of space. Mission pilot Scott Poteet and SpaceX engineer Anna Menon remained strapped in throughout as they monitored vital support systems.

It marked a “giant leap forward” for the commercial space industry, said NASA chief Bill Nelson, as well as another triumphant achievement for SpaceX.

Though the company was only founded in 2002, it has outpaced its legacy competitors thanks in large part to founder Elon Musk’s vast fortune and zeal to begin the colonization of Mars.

Rousing violin solo 

Since completing their extravehicular activity, the crew have continued to carry out roughly 40 science experiments — for example inserting endoscopic cameras through their noses and into their throats to image their airways and better understand the impact of long-duration space missions on human health.

They also demonstrated connectivity with SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellite constellation by sending back to ground control a high-resolution video of Gillis playing “Rey’s Theme” by “Star Wars” composer John Williams, on the violin. 

Polaris Dawn is the first of three missions under the Polaris program, a collaboration between Isaacman and SpaceX.

Financial terms of the partnership remain under wraps but Isaacman, the 41-year-old founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments, reportedly poured $200 million of his own money into leading the 2021 all-civilian SpaceX Inspiration4 orbital mission.

The final Polaris mission aims to be the first crewed flight of SpaceX’s Starship, a prototype next-generation rocket that is key to Musk’s interplanetary ambitions.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Washington:

After trekking deeper into space than any humans in the last half-century, a pioneering private crew is set to make history Thursday with the first-ever spacewalk by non-professional astronauts.

The SpaceX Polaris Dawn mission, led by fintech billionaire Jared Isaacman, launched early Tuesday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, reaching a peak altitude of 870 miles (1,400 kilometres).

That’s more than three times higher than the International Space Station, in a region of space called the inner Van Allen radiation belt — a zone teeming with dangerous, high-energy particles.

Now, with their Dragon spaceship’s elliptical orbit reduced to a low point of roughly 120 miles and a high of 430 miles, the crew of four is gearing up for the mission’s centrepiece: an audacious extravehicular activity (EVA) scheduled for 0958 GMT on Thursday, with a backup window on Friday.

SpaceX pushed the time back by a few hours early Thursday, without explaining why. It plans a webcast of the event starting about an hour beforehand, on its website. 

‘Bit of a dance’ 

Prior to the hatch opening, the crew will complete a “pre-breathe” process to purge nitrogen from their blood, preventing decompression sickness caused by nitrogen bubbles. The cabin pressure will then be gradually reduced to match that of space.

After it’s opened, Isaacman and crewmate Sarah Gillis, a SpaceX engineer, will take turns peeking out from a structure attached to the hatch dubbed “Skywalker,” equipped with hand and footholds.

“It’ll look like we’re doing a little bit of a dance,” Isaacman quipped during a recent press conference. 

In reality, they’re stress-testing SpaceX’s next-generation suits, which boast heads-up displays, helmet cameras and enhanced joint mobility systems. 

However, they won’t float away on a tether like early spacefarers such as Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov or NASA’s Ed White did in 1965. Instead, they’ll cling to the spacecraft as it orbits Earth at roughly 17,500 mph.

Since the Crew Dragon capsule lacks an airlock, the entire crew will be exposed to the vacuum of space for the duration of the spacewalk, around two hours. After the hatch is closed, the cabin will be repressurized, and oxygen and nitrogen levels will return to normal.

Mission pilot Scott Poteet and SpaceX engineer Anna Menon will monitor vital support systems during the activity, while Isaacman and Gillis are expected to each spend about 15 to 20 minutes partially outside the craft.

“The risk is greater than zero, that’s for sure, and it’s certainly higher than anything that has been accomplished on a commercial basis,” former NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe told AFP.

“This is another watershed event in the march toward commercialization of space for transportation,” he added, comparing the crewmates to early aviators who paved the way for modern air travel.

First of three Polaris missions 

All four underwent more than two years of training in preparation for the landmark mission, logging hundreds of hours on simulators as well as skydiving, centrifuge training, scuba diving and summiting an Ecuadoran volcano.

Beyond their spacewalk, the crew will test laser-based satellite communications between the spacecraft and the vast Starlink satellite constellation. 

They’ll also carry out 36 scientific experiments, including tests on contact lenses with embedded microelectronics to monitor changes in eye pressure and shape in space.

Polaris Dawn is the first of three missions under the Polaris program, a collaboration between Isaacman and SpaceX.

Financial terms of the partnership remain under wraps, but Isaacman, the 41-year-old founder and CEO of Shift4Payments, reportedly poured $200 million of his fortune into leading the 2021 all-civilian SpaceX Inspiration4 orbital mission.

The final Polaris mission aims to be the first crewed flight of SpaceX’s Starship, a prototype next-generation rocket that is key to founder Elon Musk’s ambitions of colonizing Mars.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)