Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX successfully launched its fourth test flight on Thursday. The 400-feet-tall Starship rocket, along with the Heavy booster, lifted off after 6 p.m. IST from SpaceX's Starbase facility near Boca Chica Beach in South Texas on June 6.
"Liftoff of Starship!" SpaceX wrote in a post on X.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) gave the green light for the flight on Tuesday after all safety and other licensing requirements for the test were met. The large Starship's raptor engines ignited during hot-staging separation. Flight 4 followed a similar trajectory as the previous test flights, with the Starship splashing down in the Indian Ocean.
"Super Heavy has splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico," the company said.
The fourth flight test is aimed at inching "closer to the rapidly reusable future on the horizon", the company said.
While it has so far had three test flights, its reusability remains a concern, as the "shuttle's heat shield required over 6 months of refurbishment by a large team", Musk said earlier.
"Building upon what we achieved during Starship's third flight test, our primary goal today is to get through the extreme heat of reentry," the company said.
To facilitate this, SpaceX "intentionally placed one thin heat shield tile and removed two tiles completely from the Ship". This will help measure temperature levels without tiles in those spots and test thermal protection options.
"If Starship manages to make it all the way to reentry, we'll collect valuable data on the vehicle at hypersonic speeds, or more than 5x the speed of sound," the company noted, prior to the launch.
The huge Starship vehicle is intended to land astronauts on the Moon during the crewed Artemis 3 mission in 2026, and later to Mars and beyond.
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Inputs from IANS
