Items tagged with starship
He shoots, he scores? SpaceX recently successfully launched and landed their current Starship prototype, referred to as the SN10. Despite the successful flight and landing, SpaceX’s SN10 eventually exploded a few minutes later on its landing pad. The SN10 was launched from a test site in Boca Chica, Texas yesterday afternoon. This was technically the second attempt at a launch, as the first launch had been aborted. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted, “Launch abort on slightly conservative high thrust limit. Increasing thrust limit & recycling propellant for another flight attempt today.” The fuel from the SN10 was recycled and the rocket was prepped for the next launch. The second...
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We can expect one small step for man and one giant leap for SpaceX and their SN8 Starship in approximately a week from now. Yesterday, Elon Musk tweeted that the SN8 Starship is being prepared for static fire tests and a flight to 60,000 feet and back. Back in August, we reported on SpaceX doing 150-meter hops with the SN5 Starship. More recently, the SN6 did a 150-meter hop test as well. These tests were powered by the SpaceX Raptor engine, which should also be used in the upcoming SN8 test. However, both previous prototypes looked more like shiny Pringles cans with a rocket motor than a proper rocket ship. With the previous tests, SpaceX’s goal was to see if the Starship's stainless-steel...
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SpaceX hit another milestone this week with an early prototype of its Starship rocket taking flight for the first time. The company posted a short clip to YouTube that shows the unfinished rocket light its Raptor engine and take to the sky. Eventually, later versions of the spacecraft will use multiple Raptor engines, but a single engine was all that was necessary for this test flight. The video shows ignition with smoke, flame, and dust billowing around the rocket and obscuring it shortly before the top of the shiny metal rocket emerged from the cloud and lifted upward. The rocket attained an altitude of roughly 150 meters before firing a thruster out of its right side to move it towards a landing...
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Image from Padre Labs The amount of pressure that SpaceX is under is enough to make anyone blow their top. This is exactly what happened to a Starship prototype. An upper stage for SpaceX’s Starship MK-1 prototype erupted during a pressurization test. The pressurization test occurred on Wednesday in Boca Chica, Texas. The upper portion of the rocket blew its top 500 feet into the air, while smoke from a ruptured tank of cryogenic propellants dissipated. According to a statement from SpaceX, “The purpose of [the] test was to pressurize systems to the max, so the outcome was not completely unexpected.” Footage of the explosion was caught on a webcam situated on South Padre Island....
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Starship isn’t just the name of a rocking 80’s band or an interstellar spacecraft -- it is also the name of a new company by former Skype co-founders which intends to improve local deliveries through self-driving, autonomous robots. A friendly little robot could soon be delivering your pepperoni pizza instead of a moody neighborhood teen. Ahti Heinla, a Skype co-founder and CEO at Starship Technologies remarked, “Our vision revolves around three zeroes – zero cost, zero waiting time and zero environmental impact. We want to do to local deliveries what Skype did to telecommunications.” Starship Technologies is getting ready to introduce small, environmentally-friendly, earth-bound delivery robots....
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