WASHINGTON, November 18. The Starship spacecraft launched in Texas for its second test flight, SpaceX is broadcasting live.
The launch of the spacecraft from the Boca Chica site in Texas took place at 7.02 U.S. East Coast time (16.02 Moscow time).
In the third minute of the flight successful separation of stages occurred. The ship crossed the boundary of space and rose to a height of 148 kilometers.
According to the company's calculations, if the test flight is ideal, the ship should 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 is a Super Heavy rocket, equipped with 33 Raptor engines.
The owner of SpaceX, businessman Elon Musk, is positioning Starship as a transportation system that in the future can be used for space flights to the Moon and Mars. In October, company owner Elon Musk said that an unmanned Starship flight to Mars could take place within the next 4 years. The start of manned flights will require many certification flights.
The first launch of the ship took place in April of this year and ended in failure – a few minutes after launch the ship began to rotate uncontrollably and was soon destroyed. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) identified “multiple causes” of the accident and identified more than 60 “corrective actions” for Musk's company to avoid a repeat accident. As SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said, in the months since the accident, the company's engineers have made a total of more than a thousand improvements to the Starship and Super Heavy systems.
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