​The world’s most powerful Starship rocket, designed by Elon Musk’s company, is on the launch pad, days away from its second orbital test after the spring-loaded rocket disintegrated shortly after launch.

If the FAA gives the go-ahead, the new Starship will begin testing as early as Friday, November 17, at Starbase Boca Chica, Texas. The first attempt was on April 20th, and although it ended in an explosion, they gave SpaceX a lot of information about what went wrong. It took the company more than six months to fix the design issues.

This second test can NOT be conducted without a green light from the FAA.

• The rocket exploded, but SpaceX was happy – Why the first Starship launch was NOT a disaster

In this test, Elon Musk and his people hope that the super heavy rocket and Starship will stay in space even longer. Three minutes after launch, the two mega-elements should separate and go their separate ways. In this test, too, SpaceX will not recover any of the elements, but hopes they will successfully separate and land successfully in the ocean (Super Heavy eight minutes after launch, Starship 90 minutes).

The Starship stage, which is 50 meters long and equipped with six Raptor engines, should reach Earth orbit during this test in the fall of 2023 or one that is likely to take place in early 2024. If the Starship reaches orbit, another critical “threshold” will be for the heat shield to withstand temperatures of thousands of degrees Celsius after re-entry into the atmosphere.

Falcon 9 rockets, which are launched every few days with satellites, return and can be reused because they land with “legs”. A Super Heavy rocket will not be able to use such a system because it is much larger, the legs will add a lot of weight and may give way on rebound. A different recovery mechanism was developed for the Super Heavy: the rocket returns to the launch pad, decelerates almost completely, and is grabbed by a giant mechanical arm.

It will be an exciting moment after all goes well with the Starship test and we get to the point where we see the arm grab the rocket and place it nicely for later use. I hope we will reach this level by 2024.

Going even further into the future, there will be a countdown when the first on-orbit fuel tests will be performed. When a rocket launches, it uses up almost all of its fuel in the first few minutes, so if humans are to go on longer missions to the moon – and in the future to Mars – a lot of fuel will be needed.

Refueling is also a very complicated matter on Earth, as seen in the launch attempts of NASA’s SLS rocket from the Artemis 1 mission. We can imagine what a technological super-achievement it will be when the rocket is refueled in orbit from fuel and an oxidizer tank (“fuel depot”).

These “on-orbit refueling” technologies would mean that the Starship rocket would need to be launched into orbit and placed there as a fuel “tank”. Then another megarocket designed for a complex mission will have to collide with the first rocket.

Sources: phys.org, space.com