The sixth flight of SpaceX's Starship went off today without a second capture landing of the Super Heavy first stage, but it did have a dramatic daylight powered soft landing of the Starship second stage in the Indian Ocean. And a banana.
Today's mission had an unusually smooth countdown for an experimental development flight, with the final pause waived as the world's largest rocket lifted off at 4.00 pm CST from SpaceX's Starbase launch site at Boca Chica, Texas.
The ascent went without incident, with the moment of peak aerodynamic stress passed about one minute into the mission and the shutdown of all but the core of the 30 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy first stage shutting down at two minutes and 32 seconds. Seven seconds later, the Starship second stage made a hot-staging separation where the Super Heavy kept its engines firing while Starship fired up.
As Starship went into a suborbital space trajectory, the Super Heavy carried what is now a routine boostback burn to return it to Starbase. However, it was not captured by the Mechzilla tower system because the Go/No Go system of health checks and human final decisions vetoed a capture for safety reasons and the rocket made a soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico instead.
Meanwhile Starship coasted to its landing site in the Indian Ocean. During the flight, it refired a Raptor engine. This was not necessary for the mission but it was a test of the orbital return burn that will be needed when Starship becomes operational and reusable.
About 47 minutes after launch, Starship reentered the atmosphere, did a flip to position its engines downward and made a powered landing at the one-hour-and-five-minute mark in daylight, which allowed for not only spectacular footage, but more information for SpaceX engineers.
The purpose of the mission was the final flight of Block One of Starship, with Flight 7 seeing the first flight of the improved Block 2 that will carry double the payload. Incidentally, Flight 6 saw the first actual payload carried by a Starship, though this consisted of a single banana that was held up on strings as a visual indicator for when the spacecraft went weightless.
More practical objectives of the mission included testing redundant propulsion systems, increased structural strengthening, and new software controls. In addition, Starship had a new heat shield configuration that will allow the installation of docking systems that Starship will need when it is delivering fuel to an orbital supply depot. The new shield is also closer to the one that will be able to handle the steeper reentry angle that the craft will need to steer when it makes an actual capture landing.
Watch Starship's sixth flight test → https://t.co/oIFc3u9laE https://t.co/acpdO2brbP
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 16, 2024
According to SpaceX, because of the shift to a new version of Starship, Mission 7 will take longer to ready than the period between Flights 5 and 6.
No announcement has been made about what sort of fruit will be aboard.
Source: SpaceX
