Musk showed a new prototype of the Starship spacecraft. Will fly soon – photo

The head of SpaceX, Elon Musk, showed on Twitter a photo of a new test sample of the Starship spacecraft, which is numbered SN10.

 

“At the launch site. Engines are being replaced,” he signed the picture.

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The billionaire businessman hinted in one of the online chats a few days ago that the next test suborbital flight of his brainchild to an altitude of about 10 km, followed by a soft landing attempt, could take place on February 25. But, as is often the case with SpaceX, the date will be pushed forward.

On December 9, 2020, SN8 successfully completed all missions except landing.

On February 2, SN9 also crashed, when after the descent just before landing (when turning from horizontal to vertical), two Raptor engines were scheduled to turn on, and one of them unscheduled failure. Starship didn’t have time to “turn around”, take a landing position and extinguish speed, as a result of which it crashed into the ground.

REFERENCE… The final version of the reusable Starship spacecraft, together with the SuperHeavy stage, will be about 120 m high, 9 m in diameter, with a launch mass of up to 5000 tons. They want to bring the carrying capacity 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. Raptor is a closed cycle liquid engine with full gasification of fuel components (liquid methane and oxygen).

Musk later said what engineers would use to avoid destroying the prototype next time.

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