NASA Artemis Mission Progresses with SpaceX Starship Test Flight
As part of NASA’s Artemis campaign
to return humans to the Moon for the benefit of all, the agency is working with
SpaceX to develop the company’s Starship human landing system (HLS), which will
land astronauts near the Moon’s South Pole during the Artemis III and
Artemis IV missions. On March 14, SpaceX launched the third integrated flight
test of its Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage, an important
milestone toward providing NASA with a Starship HLS for its Artemis missions.
A complement of
33 Raptor engines, fueled by super-cooled liquid methane and liquid oxygen,
powered the Super Heavy booster with Starship stacked on top, from the
company’s Starbase orbital launch pad at 8:25 a.m. CDT. Starship, using six
Raptor engines, separated from the Super Heavy booster employing a hot-staging
technique to fire the engines before separation at approximately three minutes
into the flight, in accordance with the flight plan. This was the third flight
test of the integrated Super Heavy-Starship system.
“With each
flight test, SpaceX attempts increasingly ambitious objectives for Starship to
learn as much as possible for future mission systems development. The ability
to test key systems and processes in flight scenarios like these integrated
tests allows both NASA and SpaceX to gather crucial data needed for the
continued development of Starship HLS,” said Lisa Watson-Morgan, HLS Program
Manager at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
This test
accomplished several important firsts that will contribute to the development
of Starship for Artemis lunar landing missions. The spacecraft reached its
expected orbit and Starship completed the full-duration ascent burn.
One objective
closely tied to future Artemis operations is the transfer of thousands of
pounds of cryogenic propellant between internal tanks during the spacecraft’s
coast phase as part of NASA’s Space Technology Missions Directorate 2020 Tipping Point awards. The propellant transfer
demonstration operations were completed, and the NASA-SpaceX team is currently
reviewing the flight data that was received. This Tipping Point technology
demonstration is one of more than 20 development activities NASA is undertaking
to solve the challenges of using cryogenic fluids during
future missions.
As a key step
toward understanding how super-cooled propellant sloshes within the tanks when
the engines shut down, and how that movement affects Starship’s stability while
in orbit, engineers will study flight test data to assess the performance of
thrusters that control Starship’s orientation in space. They are also
interested to learn more about how the fluid’s movement within the tanks can be
settled to maximize propellant transfer efficiency and ensure Raptor engines
receive needed propellant conditions to support restart in orbit.
“Storing and
transferring cryogenic propellant in orbit has never been attempted on this
scale before,” said Jeremy Kenny, project manager, NASA’s Cryogenic Fluid
Management Portfolio at Marshall. “But this is a game-changing technology that
must be developed and matured for science and exploration missions at the Moon,
Mars, and those that will venture even deeper into our solar system.”
Under NASA’s
Artemis campaign, the agency will land the first woman, first person of color,
and its first international partner astronaut on the lunar surface and prepare
for human expeditions to Mars. Commercial human landing systems are critical to
deep space exploration, along with the Space Launch System rocket, Orion
spacecraft, advanced spacesuits and rovers, exploration ground systems, and the
Gateway space station.
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