The launch of a 400-foot-tall (122 meters) rocket won’t seem like a novelty for much longer.SpaceX’s giant Starship vehicle lifted off for the third time ever today (March 14) on an ambitious test flight that energized space fans around the world.Starship didn’t achieve all of its goals today; both its first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, and its upper-stage spacecraft were lost as they came back to Earth, for example. But the megarocket flew faster, farther and longer than it had before, cheering the company and NASA, whose Artemis program will use Starship to land astronauts on the moon.”Congrats to @SpaceX on a successful test flight! Starship has soared into the heavens. Together, we are making great strides through Artemis to return humanity to the moon — then look onward to Mars,” NASA chief Bill Nelson said via X today.Related: SpaceX launches giant Starship rocket into space on epic 3rd test flight (video)Read more: Relive SpaceX Starship’s 3rd flight test in breathtaking photosStarship’s first crewed moon landing for NASA is scheduled to take place in September 2026, on the agency’s Artemis 3 mission. Getting Starship up and running in time to meet that deadline will require a lot of work — and SpaceX has rolled up its sleeves.The company has already built four more Starships at its Starbase facility in South Texas, which hosted today’s launch.”These vehicles are slated for future flight tests just like today’s,” Siva Bharadvaj, a space operations engineer at SpaceX, said during a webcast of today’s launch.”And, in fact, just this week, we static-fired our next ship that’s planning to fly and expect to test the booster as soon as the launch mount is free from today’s flight test,” he added.SpaceX will aim to get these and future vehicles aloft as quickly as possible, in keeping with the company’s “build, fly and iterate” philosophy. Indeed, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said this week that the company hopes to launch at least six Starship missions in 2024.Musk is known for his aggressive timelines, but that one may well be achievable. Seven months elapsed between the first Starship test flight, in April 2023, and the second, which occurred this past November. The gap between flight two and today’s launch was just four mo …
Article Attribution | Read More at Article Source
[mwai_chat context=”Let’s have a discussion about this article:nnThe launch of a 400-foot-tall (122 meters) rocket won’t seem like a novelty for much longer.SpaceX’s giant Starship vehicle lifted off for the third time ever today (March 14) on an ambitious test flight that energized space fans around the world.Starship didn’t achieve all of its goals today; both its first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, and its upper-stage spacecraft were lost as they came back to Earth, for example. But the megarocket flew faster, farther and longer than it had before, cheering the company and NASA, whose Artemis program will use Starship to land astronauts on the moon.”Congrats to @SpaceX on a successful test flight! Starship has soared into the heavens. Together, we are making great strides through Artemis to return humanity to the moon — then look onward to Mars,” NASA chief Bill Nelson said via X today.Related: SpaceX launches giant Starship rocket into space on epic 3rd test flight (video)Read more: Relive SpaceX Starship’s 3rd flight test in breathtaking photosStarship’s first crewed moon landing for NASA is scheduled to take place in September 2026, on the agency’s Artemis 3 mission. Getting Starship up and running in time to meet that deadline will require a lot of work — and SpaceX has rolled up its sleeves.The company has already built four more Starships at its Starbase facility in South Texas, which hosted today’s launch.”These vehicles are slated for future flight tests just like today’s,” Siva Bharadvaj, a space operations engineer at SpaceX, said during a webcast of today’s launch.”And, in fact, just this week, we static-fired our next ship that’s planning to fly and expect to test the booster as soon as the launch mount is free from today’s flight test,” he added.SpaceX will aim to get these and future vehicles aloft as quickly as possible, in keeping with the company’s “build, fly and iterate” philosophy. Indeed, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said this week that the company hopes to launch at least six Starship missions in 2024.Musk is known for his aggressive timelines, but that one may well be achievable. Seven months elapsed between the first Starship test flight, in April 2023, and the second, which occurred this past November. The gap between flight two and today’s launch was just four mo …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]
