The fourth time. For the fourth time this year, the largest and most powerful rocket ever lifted off its launch pad in South Texas. This time too, SpaceX managed to launch this extremely complex colossus on the first attempt for the fifth time in a row.
The nearly five thousand ton assembly successfully ignited all of its Raptor rocket engines and took off into the sky with a huge roar. The ascent phase was again without any problems.
The Super Heavy Starship successfully overcame the phase of greatest dynamic stress, stage separation using Hot-staging, with all Raptors on Starship S31 successfully igniting.
The Super Heavy B13 then re-ignited the ten engines in the middle ring, performed a turn against the direction of flight, and headed back towards the coast.
As with the previous flight, this time, too, a return and capture using the Chopsticks arms was to be carried out, but unfortunately, after more thorough checks, a technical problem was revealed in the tower systems, which made the capture attempt impossible and the Super Heavy was directed above the surface of the Gulf of Mexico to a distance of several kilometers from the ramp.
Specifically, Musk mentioned that the reason for the interruption was the loss of communication between the control center and the tower itself, whose damaged antenna at the top could also be seen. The tower would have been able to intercept the Super Heavy, but for safety reasons the decision was made to cancel the attempt.
Nevertheless, B13 successfully landed accurately and softly on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, where it exploded shortly after, as expected, and split into two halves. The upper half with the methane tank sank almost immediately, but the lower half remained afloat for several hours.
Starship S31 entered the flyby phase at approximately nine minutes, and approximately thirty-eight minutes after launch, one of the major milestones set for the sixth flight occurred, and Starship successfully demonstrated the Raptor’s ability to ignite in space, i.e. the ability to perform primarily deorbital ignitions. During this test, a single Raptor was fired for approximately four seconds. Forty minutes after launch at an altitude of approximately 123 kilometers, the first signs of thermal stress began to appear on the cameras.
During this mission, SpaceX planned to test the hardware limits of the entire machine with the S31 prototype, as the last of the first-generation Starship, and to obtain as much data as possible about the behavior of the heat shield and control system, i.e. the flaps. For this reason, Starship entered the atmosphere at a greater angle than the previous 70°.
After twenty minutes of fiery hell, the thermal stress began to significantly weaken, and even though SpaceX managed to survive the return very well due to difficult conditions, such as greater thermal stress, approximately two thousand one hundred missing heat shield plates, and a significant adjustment of the flight trajectory in the final phase of descent. At first glance, of course, some damage was visible, such as a wavy body from extreme temperatures, a slightly burning upper wing (significantly less than during the fourth and fifth flights) and in some places fallen heat shield plates.
However, none of this prevented Starship S31 from carrying out the landing burn and finally successfully touching down on the surface of the Indian Ocean. Thanks to the deliberate postponement of the launch from the morning to the afternoon, this time it landed on a lit part of the Earth, so we had much better footage of the landing maneuver.
This time too, SpaceX had a buoy with a camera placed in the landing area and probably a ship with better equipment nearby. After all, you can see the footage for yourself. Although I will repeat myself again, the sixth flight test of the Super Heavy Starship cannot be summed up other than a great success for the Starship, which was not even predicted to survive the passage through the atmosphere. In a certain form, this flight is also a success for the Super Heavy, which managed the entire flight perfectly without a single problem and successfully landed in a designated area. When the seventh integrated flight of the Super Heavy Starship could take place is currently up in the air, as the license for the second-generation Starship launches has not been processed. In terms of hardware, both prototypes are already essentially complete. However, it is assumed that they will undergo a static ignition – both Starship S33 and Super Heavy B14.
