MOSCOW, Nov 18 SpaceX stopped receiving information about the flight of the Starship spacecraft after its second test launch in Texas , follows from the company’s live broadcast.
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"We lost the second stage data. <…> We think that we may have lost the second stage,” said the commentator.
The launch of the spacecraft from the Boca Chica site in Texas took place at 7:02 am East Coast time (16:02 Moscow time). In the third minute of the flight, the stages were successfully separated. The device crossed the boundary of space and rose to a height of 148 kilometers.
According to the company's calculations, during an ideal test flight the ship would rotate around the Earth and then fall into the Pacific Ocean near the Hawaiian Islands.
Starship is the largest and most powerful system ever created for space launches. The first stage — the Super Heavy rocket — is equipped with 33 Raptor engines.
The owner of SpaceX, businessman Elon Musk, is positioning Starship as a transport system that in the future can be used for flights to the Moon and Mars. In October, the entrepreneur said that an unmanned flight of this ship to Mars could take place in the next four years. To begin manned travel, many certification flights will be required.
The first launch of the ship took place in April of this year and ended in failure — a few minutes after launch, Starship began to rotate uncontrollably and soon collapsed. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) identified «multiple causes» of the incident and identified more than 60 «corrective actions» for Musk's company to avoid a repeat accident. As the head of SpaceX said, over the past months, the company's engineers have made more than a thousand improvements to the Starship and Super Heavy systems.
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