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From Texas to Hawaii around the Earth. Musk showed Starship orbital test flight plan

On its first test flight into orbit, SpaceX’s rocket ship will leave a test site in southern Texas and splash down off the coast of one of the Hawaiian Islands. This follows from the document that Elon Musk’s company filed with the US Federal Communications Commission, writes The Verge.

 

This will be the Starship’s first flight alongside the impressive Super Heavy stage. She will work out and split with the ship somewhere in the third minute after the start. In about five minutes, the Super Heavy will splash down in the Gulf of Mexico, 32 km offshore.

The spacecraft, on the other hand, will continue to move in orbit with an apogee of no more than 116 km, and, having flown 3/4 of the way around the Earth, will re-enter the atmosphere over Hawaii about 90 minutes after launch.

Like the Falcon 9 stages, Starship will attempt a precision landing in the ocean about 100 km northwest of the coast of Kauai, Hawaii’s northernmost island.

Click on the map to enlarge

When such a test might take place is unknown. Musk himself and other SpaceX employees previously said that it is planned for 2021, but the accompanying email to the FCC application indicates that the next one is until March 1, 2022.

REFERENCE… The final version of the reusable Starship spacecraft, together with the Super Heavy stage, will be about 120 m high, 9 m in diameter, with a launch weight of up to 5000 tons. They want to bring the payload up to 150 tons into low-earth orbit. Case material – alloy 304L stainless steel. It is designed for both close (from one point of the Earth to another) and long-distance flights into space, including the Moon and Mars. It is planned that the ship will be able to take on board up to 100 people.

The orbital test “will demonstrate maneuvers that cannot be simulated on computers,” the SpaceX document says.

“We intend to collect as much data as possible during flight in order to quantify the dynamics of entry and better understand what the vehicle is experiencing in flight mode, which is extremely difficult to accurately predict or simulate using calculations,” the application says.

  • On December 9, 2020, SpaceX began launching Starship samples on suborbital test flights.
  • On May 9, 2021, SpaceX set a record: there is a symbolic 10th launch of the same rocket.

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