Editorial: SpaceX rocket Starship is reaching for the skies

The SpaceX company's Starship rocket at the launch site in Boca Chica, Texas. Photo / AP

EDITORIAL

It looks like something out of Star Wars, a black rocket on top of a mammoth gleaming steel booster.

The SpaceX rocket Starship spacecraft and the Super Heavy first-stage firepower underneath are, together, the biggest space launch system ever built, standing 120m high.

Not only does it look different from the old white space shuttles, Starship represents a big step towards a vision of eventual mass travel to Mars and the moon.

A first test flight from Texas with both sections and no one on board, was expected early this morning after the United States Federal Aviation Administration gave approval at the weekend.

However, the test run was scrapped after a valve froze as cold fuel was being loaded. Another attempt is expected to be made later this week.

SpaceX isn’t planning landings for the test flight for either section, with the parts set to fall into the sea. Earlier versions of the spacecraft flew four times and crashed before landing upright in 2021. The big booster is having its maiden flight.

A one-and-a-half-hour zoom around the globe is planned, but SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk believed the rocket’s chances of making orbit on the test flight were “hopefully about 50 per cent”.

Harvard University astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell says the key will be when Starship gets to the point of being able to land intact after a flight into orbit.

Other Starships are under construction. Musk hopes that reusability will be proven in a couple of years.

The booster has 33 main engines and is believed capable of lifting as much as 250 tonnes and 100 people. The spacecraft has six engines.

Before it carries anyone anywhere, Starship will be used to release satellites in low orbit. Eventually, there is hoped to be a crewed orbiting flight and two private flights to and around the moon.

Overall, SpaceX has proven itself as a reliable operator in space. On Sunday, Musk noted that SpaceX’s Dragon had just completed the company’s 27th cargo resupply mission to the international space station.

SpaceX has a US$3 billion contract with Nasa to land astronauts on the moon as early as 2025. In a huge undertaking, the astronauts would travel on Nasa’s Orion capsule and rocket, and then transfer to Starship in lunar orbit for the moon landing, and then back to the capsule.

Other new rockets by other operators are on the way, including one by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin which Nasa plans to use to send spacecraft to Mars next year.

While big dreams and ambitious missions capture the imagination, space ventures can be an expensive disaster as Richard Branson’s Space Orbit shows. The satellite launch company filed for bankruptcy.

It’s an interesting time for space and science.

New Zealand is part of it, with Nasa launching a super pressure balloon, carrying an imaging telescope from Princeton University, at Wānaka Airport on Sunday. The telescope will ”image large galaxy clusters from a balloon platform in a near-space environment”, Nasa says.

The European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) launched last week on an eight-year journey to the outer solar system. It will take images of Jupiter and its icy moons in 2031.

And the James Webb Space Telescope has discovered a galaxy that formed soon after the Big Bang.

There will be a lot of interest in Starship’s test run when it happens, but it may take quite a while for the programme to prove itself.