NASA Artemis Mission Progresses with SpaceX

As part of NASA’s ambitious Artemis campaign aimed at returning humans to the Moon for the collective benefit, collaboration with SpaceX is underway to develop the Starship human landing system (HLS) for landing astronauts near the Moon’s South Pole during the Artemis III and Artemis IV missions. SpaceX marked a significant milestone on March 14 by launching the third integrated flight test of its Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage, a crucial step towards providing

Powered by a complement of 33 Raptor engines fueled by super-cooled liquid methane and liquid oxygen, the Super Heavy booster, with Starship stacked on top, lifted off from SpaceX’s Starbase orbital launch pad at 8:25 a.m. CDT. The Starship, utilizing six Raptor engines, separated from the Super Heavy booster through a hot-staging technique, igniting the engines before separation approximately three minutes into the flight, in accordance with the flight plan. This marked the third flight test of the integrated Super Heavy-Starship system.

Lisa Watson-Morgan, HLS Program Manager at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, emphasized the significance of these flight tests, stating, “With each flight test, SpaceX aims for increasingly ambitious objectives for Starship to gather crucial data needed for the continued development of Starship HLS.”

The spacecraft reached its expected orbit, and Starship completed the full-duration ascent burn.

One critical objective tied to future Artemis operations is the transfer of thousands of pounds of cryogenic propellant between internal tanks during the spacecraft’s coast phase. Completion of the propellant transfer demonstration operations marked a key achievement, with the NASA-SpaceX team currently reviewing the received flight data. This technology

SpaceX Orbit Largest Spacecraft In History also SpaceX Destroy Largest Spacecraft In History

hello it’s Scott Manley here as you probably heard by now SpaceX performed the third test flight of Starship and super heavy on Pi Day March 14th why do people love Pi I don’t know it’s irrational it’s also transcendental and it’s also spacex’s 22nd birthday the launch window was supposed to open at 7:00 a.m. but this was delayed uh as many of us feared including myself due to the weather the was uh there were some serious concerns with the winds with the speeds predicted to reach 37 knots at 3, 000 ft spacex’s goal was to be more successful than they were on flight number two where but they successfully hot staged but the booster exploded and the Starship failed to reach orbit after an oxygen dump caused a fire in the engine bay and ultimately a vehicle failure so the first thing we were watching out for was the hot staging to make sure that the engines on the booster relit successfully after they didn’t do it on if2 and then we’d be watching the Boost back and The Descent through the atmosphere hopefully to a soft Landing meanwhile Starship was going to cons continue downrange following a slightly different trajectory into a lower inclination orbit which would carry it over Africa and then into a landing in the Indian Ocean during this partial orbit it would perform a number of other tests it would open the Pez dispenser cargo door it would perform a cryogen genic propellant transfer test between tanks inside and it would attempt to relight the engine and that would actually mean that the place that it touched down in the Indian Ocean wouldn’t be certain because they would have to perform this maneuver and finally we all hoped it would get to the re-entry phase where we’d actually finally get to see the heat shield the belly flop maneuver at Mark 25 and so I can tell you now that SpaceX absolutely achieved more successes than on its previous flight definitely a step forward albeit they didn’t get all the successes that they wanted right away straight after liftoff the first thing we did was we looked at that engine diagram and we saw all engines lit and saw this Drone footage again showing this flying wonderfully through these clouds and unfortunately that meant a lot of the fans who are over in Bach chica did not get a great view of this there was fog right up till launch and uh yeah that was a problem but we did get a lot of onboard footage the onboard footage from this flight was absolutely your Chef kissed perfect we got so many great views and a big part of this was just having multiplay redundant starlink antenna on the side of both the Starship and the booster I particularly love this moment where it ascends through a cloud layer just it’s it’s great seeing these stratified clouds just whipping by you in a rocket I wish my plane climbed that fast then again I’m glad I’m not footing this fuel Bill around that time by the way it would have been passing through Max Q maximum aerodynamic pressure from the starship’s point of view we do see a few tiles missing but it seemed like an improvement again on previous flights I think this is my favorite camera by the way because it sticks out on one of the fins so it stands a reasonable distance away from the edge of the rocket you can actually see the surface so anyway at this point it’s getting up high we’re going to play this at four times regular speed it’s we’re we’re not worried about any structural failures at this point it is just ascending getting faster what we’re really concerned about is when stage separation happens so yeah the plan is here you have to shut down a bunch of engines but not all of the engines and then once you’re stable you have to light the engines on the second stage and have them fly apart and once they are sufficiently far apart you relight the engines on the first stage as it heads back to home this time they got all those engines lit on the first stage if you remember during the previous flight the engines were failing we saw all sorts of puffs of smoke as engines started to die

and eventually the booster exploded now this was officially blamed on stuff that was clogging propellant filters uh I we don’t know what that stuff was it could well be bits of the inside of the tank from fuel slash but until SpaceX uh tells us otherwise we don’t know in this case however it is boosting backwards reducing the velocity while the altitude increases and eventually it will be going backwards towards home not quite all the way home just far enough tha t they can show that this boost back works now then the thing to watch for is the shutdown of the engines and it seems rather asymmetrical to me I’m not sure if that’s bad Telemetry but if it isn’t that asymmetric shutdown would seem to imply there was some problem it’s not clear what so anyway Starship continues downrange but for the booster it trajectory is very similar to what we see for the Falcon 9 booster so we would largely consider that to be a solved problem one big difference is the bo oster uh does not use an entry burn it’s going to hit the atmosphere at full speed and take all that Force because it’s designed to do this from day one the primary control mechanism during this phase will be the four large grid fins and you can see one of them on the left screen that is the booster and you can see the grid fin so we’re going to return to normal speed now below 50 km descending at 1 km/ second and still picking up speed here you can see the grid fins begin to try to control but very quickly it looks to me as if the control sort of begins begins to get unstable and you know truthfully I think what they’re probably doing is exploring the performance of these fins or these grid fins because this is a regime that they’ve never actually tested in so they’ll be actuating it and recording details and their control laws right the logic may not be correct but anyway look we’re at 30,000 ft we’re descending still at multiple times the speed of sound just watch those Cloud layers flip by but very quickly the booster seems to pick up some kind of roll oscillation also check the condensation clouds down around the bottom it’s trying to relight the engines they don’t all come up and we just lose contact with it at zero altitude so look clearly the engines didn’t start there’s a couple possibilities one is that when they shut them down there was a problem and that’s what we saw during the the Telemetry showing the the sort of weird asymmetric touchdown it’s also possible th at the Motions of the vehicle just again caused fuel SLO caused something to get you know become a problem and they just couldn’t relight those engines because the propellant was sitting in the wrong place but you know what was in the right place it was Starship which about 8 minutes later successfully made it to orbit becoming I believe the largest spacecraft ever launched it into orbit now technically okay it’s not exactly in orbit it was slightly suborbital but it had so close to orbital ener gy that anybody that tries to split those hairs is just you know some weird SpaceX hater SpaceX deliberately chose for this flight to not quite go to orbit for safety reasons and uh you could easily have got there and yeah yeah we then had uh you know good  For 40 minutes, we were treated to stunning footage that ebbed and flowed over time. Some moments were truly breathtaking. The footage appeared intermittently as live links were established and then dropped.there was prob ably a lot of complicated stuff going on but yeah the spacecraft uh initially it seemed to you hold this attitude and we saw a lot of outgassing and that would be consistent with dumping the excess propellant remember they had done this on a previous flight and it had caused a failure so dumping it after they got to orbit would make some sense but one of the most interesting bits of footage uh from the orbit came it was just a clip very early on before they tested the door it was our first camer a view inside the nose cone of Starship and what I see here is clouds as if there’s an atmosphere still in there right it’s not like if it was in a vacuum and I think that while this isn’t designed to be airtight it was sufficiently pressure tight that there was still some pressure in here when they were ready to open the door and so remember this is like a little like a letter box that opens up and you see when they open that do you see what I’m seeing here right when that thing slid up just a little we had the atmosphere just blow out through that what’s also interesting is because that is a very thin sliver with light coming through you get one of those sort of laser light smoke machine kind of effects and it looked a bit like water when I first saw or a liquid and I thought this must have been inside the propellant tanks but no it’s an optical illusion what I’m also seeing though is that door doesn’t look like it fully opened I mean it’s really hard to tell because of the the camer a angle but we saw this happen later in the flight as they were supposed to be closing it I think the door failed and it could be that there was just too much atmosphere held inside the vehicle when they tried to open it and that caused some problems you know the space shuttle early flights they actually had problems with payload bay doors too so it’s not unprecedented so anyway moving onwards the next test that was supposed to happen was the crowen propellant transfer and well we heard announce as supposed to be relighting the engine and that was going to be performed autonomously if the conditions were correct and when the time rolled by we didn’t have any video we didn’t have any uh Telemetry that suggested it happened and SpaceX said yep it didn’t happen they’re not telling us why the engines didn’t light but say that attitude that the rotation the spinning was uh somehow anomalous that could have interfered with an engine relight so now fast forward a couple of minutes and they’re ages uh I I think they’d much rather have the vehicle in the correct attitude we were really eager to see whether the heat shield would perform especially given that we saw a couple of tiles missing but the majority of tiles were still there however I don’t think we got to see a proper heat shield test because I think the vehicle didn’t maintain attitude control correctly indeed we get to a point where um we start to see debris getting blown off the top of the vehicle and I’m wondering is that c e of 100 km or so we should start to see the effects of atmosphere pulling away light things like say broken tiles for for example you’ll also notice the fin is working left fin just like left shark Doesn’t Know It dance moves uh this spacecraft is upside down it’s not presenting the heat shield right it’s the non-heat shield side is currently facing the the air flow and so I watched this and it’s coming around with a heat shield side down I was like hope it can stop that spin right because it’s run out is it you know they talked about using IG gas do they need to upgrade the reaction control thrust yeah again this is now heading upside down we actually see like a puff of something there was that reaction control Thruster firing again now uh yeah looking backwards along its Trail it’s upside down and it’s headed into the atmosphere and I think I can begin to see a small hint of of a glow here right we’re starting to hit the plasma you know portion of this flight at Mark 25 the atmospher ommunications and Starship would somehow have to send a signal back through it now you’ll notice by the way that the roll seems to have reversed but now it appears to be pitching with its ass pointed down range and so instead of that hot Plasma impinging on the heat shield it’s going to start going into the engine bay into various you know sensitive parts of the vehicle that’s why you have to maintain attitude control we didn’t know how long we would get live footage from this we were getting Te down because Starship is big enough that it actually punches a hole through the atmosphere wide enough that you can send a radio signal back through that hole and so it is possible that we could get this perhaps in a future flight but not on this one there are essentially two ways where you have a Communications blackout due to plasma the first is that yeah plasma gets hot electrons flowing around they’re conduct Ive they interfere with radio waves and the signal can’t get out the other is where ons into orbit if they don’t mind expanding it I mean SpaceX apparently has quite a few boosters to spare on the other hand some basic things apparently didn’t work that door didn’t look right uh the attitude control failed and didn’t get through re-entry so we never really got to know how good that heat shield is I’m looking forward to flight four but I actually want to rewind to the stage separation because I predicted that they would make changes to the timing and I want to look at this in de y might go higher you’ll also notice that on if3 the uh staging happened about 3 seconds later so they get a bit more oomph out of that booster this time and yeah taking a look at the final descent into the ocean I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to use the three Center engines here and then then somehow decides to use some engines from the outer ring and that probably indicates that something failed Especially since one of them shut down so you know the booster at this point is just oh yeah I’m goi s dropping it down to two months would make sense and hopefully getting a bit closer to an actual successful an unequivocal successful flight and then of course they have to then figure out how to catch the boosters how to refuel in space how to land it there’s still a whole lot of things for SpaceX to learn about Starship through these awesome and spectacular test flights I’m Scott Manley fly