If Starship’s sixth flight has proven anything, it’s that Elon Musk made the right decision in 2018.

In his biography of Elon Muskwriter Walter Isaacson included a meeting the SpaceX CEO had with the Starship team in 2018, when the rocket was still called the Big Fucking Rocket (BFR) and had a different design.

“If we keep using carbon fiber, we’re doomed. It’s death. I’ll never get to Mars,” Musk said; according to Isaacson’s storyand Musk himself. Remembering that the Atlas rockets of the 60s were made of stainless steel, the businessman proposed using this material instead.

The book says that there was resistance at SpaceX because of the weight, but Musk insisted that the calculations be done. The conclusion was that stainless steel would be lighter thanks to the extremely cold conditions of liquid oxygen and supercooled nitrogen. And its high melting point would allow SpaceX to do outdoor welding with less-skilled labor.

The transition to stainless steel significantly lowered the rocket’s costs, but also improved its resistance to fracture, something the last three flights have more than demonstrated. Especially the latter, in which SpaceX pushed the ship to the limit and failed to break it.

The sixth flight of Starship

SpaceX launched its sixth Starship rocket on Tuesday, demonstrating for the first time that the stainless steel craft can restart its engines to maneuver in the vacuum of space, in addition to resisting atmospheric reentry in more aggressive conditions than those of previous flights.

The big setback was a failed attempt to capture the Super Heavy booster on the launch tower, something SpaceX had accomplished on the fifth flight. The landing was aborted due to a tower communication failure.

For its part, the Starship reached cruising speed eight minutes after takeoff, beginning a suborbital trajectory around the planet. In the 38th minute, the ship turned on for the first time one of its six Raptor engines in the vacuum of space to adjust its trajectory.

This test was important for future missions because it demonstrates that the spacecraft can safely deorbit after launching cargo into orbit. The card in this case was a toy banana tied with wires, but Starship will soon receive authorization to deploy second-generation Starlink satellites, with which SpaceX hopes to offer 1 Gbps connections.

The most spectacular moment of the flight, courtesy of the Starlink antennas that broadcast it live, was the ship reentry in the atmosphere, for the first time with sunlight because it had just dawned in the Indian Ocean.

Starship plunged into the plasma from an altitude of 190 kilometers with a more aggressive angle of attack than previous flights. To make matters worse, its heat shield had 2,100 fewer thermal tiles than normal because SpaceX wanted to expose the areas of the rocket where it will install the capture hardware so that the ship can land on the Mechazilla tower.

The extreme temperatures caused visible damage to the Starship’s front wings, but He still survived the maneuver and restarted its engines to become vertical and simulate a landing at a precise point in the ocean where a buoy equipped with a camera was waiting for it.

The resistance of stainless steel has once again demonstrated its robustness in this sixth flight. However, SpaceX still has a lot of work ahead to make Starship’s heat shield quickly reusable.

The seventh flight will be even more important because it marks the debut of Starship 2, with larger propellant tanks, redesigned front fins and a better heat shield.

Images | SpaceX

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