Daily Wonders in the New Space Race

I was a little too young to experience the excitement and wonder of the first Space Race. The only Apollo missions I recall are its swansongs: the launch of Skylab in 1973 (and its fiery crash back to Earth in 1979) and the Apollo-Soyuz mission of 1975 that officially ended the Space Race. Just how much the buzz of humanity’s first ventures into space captured the popular imagination can be gleaned by the street names in suburbs in my town built in the ’60s – named for planets and space missions. Even the local supermarket had a mock rocket on its front, which captivated me as a small boy.

Many Americans have reflected that, in the late ’60s when US society was fracturing, just as it is now, the Space Race gave Americans something to be proud of. Indeed, gave the world something to hope that humanity might yet transcend its Earthly squabbles.

We live in a no less exciting and awe-inspiring time of space adventure. Only, this time, it’s private enterprise pushing the boundaries of human capabilities in space, seemingly by the week. Elon Musk is doing for space what Edison and Tesla did for electricity, Ford did for cars, and Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, and Tim Berners-Lee did for computing and communications.

Just this week, Musk’s company SpaceX has had two triumphs. The first, an astonishing feat of engineering and a true leap in space technology.

SpaceX accomplished a groundbreaking engineering feat Sunday when it launched the fifth test flight of its gigantic Starship rocket and then caught the booster back at the launch pad in Texas with mechanical arms seven minutes later.

The sheer precision of SpaceX’s test is something once unimaginable in space flight. Even until recently, returning rockets splashing down within kilometres of their targets was a good outcome. To not only re-land a rocket on a launch pad, but actually catch it before it touches the ground is frankly astonishing.

This achievement is the first of its kind, and it’s crucial for SpaceX’s vision of rapidly reusing the Starship rocket, enabling human expeditions to the Moon and Mars, routine access to space for mind-bogglingly massive payloads, and novel capabilities that no other company – or country – seems close to attaining.

The test flight began with a thundering liftoff of the 398-foot-tall (121.3-meter) Starship rocket at 7:25 am CDT (12:25 UTC) from SpaceX’s Starbase launch site in South Texas, a few miles north of the US-Mexico border. The rocket’s Super Heavy booster stage fired 33 Raptor engines, generating nearly 17 million pounds of thrust and gulping 20 tons of methane and liquid oxygen propellants per second at full throttle.

This is twice the power of NASA’s Saturn V rocket, which was used to send astronauts to the Moon more than 50 years ago.

The Raptor engine is also a marvel of streamlined engineering. The once-clumsy labyrinth of pipes feeding a rocket engine has been reduced to sleek simplicity. What the rockets achieve is even more breathtaking.

After a vertical ascent from its coastal launch pad, the Starship rocket arced toward the east over the Gulf of Mexico. All 33 engines fired for more than two-and-a-half minutes, accelerating the rocket to nearly 3,300 mph (5,300 km/hr) before shutting off as the Starship upper stage ignited six more Raptor engines to continue the climb into space.

While Starship executed a seemingly flawless engine firing to accelerate itself to near orbital velocity, most observers, whether watching SpaceX’s live webcast or attending the launch in person, kept their eyes glued on the Super Heavy booster.

High over the Gulf of Mexico, the rocket used its engines to reverse course and head back toward the Texas coastline. After reaching a peak altitude of 59 miles (96 kilometers), the Super Heavy booster began a supersonic descent before reigniting 13 engines for a final braking burn. The rocket then shifted down to just three engines for the fine maneuvering required to position the rocket in a hover over the launch pad. Crackling sonic booms rippled across the mud flats.

That's when the launch pad's tower, dubbed Mechazilla, ensnared the rocket in its two weight-bearing mechanical arms, colloquially known as “chopsticks.” The engines switched off, leaving the booster suspended perhaps 200 feet above the ground.

That was just the start for SpaceX this week. Perhaps in a tacit admission that the torch is being passed, NASA is using SpaceX rockets to launch its own missions.

A long-awaited mission to study if an icy moon of Jupiter could harbor life is on its way after a launch on a Falcon Heavy rocket Oct 14 […]

Europa Clipper is one of NASA’s most expensive science missions yet, with an estimated total lifecycle cost, including four years of operations after arriving at Jupiter in 2030, of $5.2 billion. It was one of the top priorities for flagship-class planetary science missions in decadal surveys by planetary scientists, building on proposals for Europa orbiters or flyby missions for at least two decades.

That interest was linked to the mission’s goal of determining if Europa, a moon of Jupiter thought to have a subsurface ocean beneath its icy surface, could host life. The combination of liquid water, energy from the moon’s interior and the presence of organic compounds would give the moon all the basic ingredients needed for life.

Don’t get too excited, though. Europa Clipper is not searching for life itself, but investigating if Europa has the right conditions to support life – at least, as we know it. Future missions are touted to send AI-controlled robotic submarine probes to directly investigate Europa’s subsurface oceans.

While using SpaceX for the launch has saved NASA billions and a potential failure (aka ‘potential hardware compatibility issues’ with NASA’s own Space Launch System), that comes at a cost of a longer mission time. While a launch with the SLS would have allowed a three-year direct flight to Europa, SpaceX is going via a Mars flyby, with a timeline of six years to arrive at Europa.

Meanwhile, SpaceX has a busy schedule ahead.

One thing SpaceX will likely focus on soon is demonstrating that Starship can reignite its Raptor engines in space, something the ship needs to do to remove itself from low-Earth orbit and steer toward a guided reentry […]

Engineers are developing two larger versions of Starship and Super Heavy to achieve the rocket's performance goal of delivering more than 100 metric tons of payload mass to orbit. The long-term plan calls for several Starship variants, including ships outfitted for human passengers, refueling tankers, propellant depots, satellite deployers, and perhaps even a Starship-derived space station […]

Sometime next year, SpaceX plans to launch a pair of Starships into orbit using its two side-by-side launch pads in Texas. The ships will dock together in orbit and test technologies to transfer cryogenic propellants, which has never been done in space at this scale. This demonstration is a precursor to future Artemis mission campaigns, when Starships must launch in rapid succession from multiple pads.

One thing’s for sure: the new space race will continue to deliver jaw-dropping achievements for years to come.