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With Starship Flight 10, SpaceX Prioritized Resilience Over Perfection
jeudi 28 août 2025, 05:30 , par Slashdot
![]() When the massive Starship rocket lifted off on its 10th test flight Tuesday evening, SpaceX did more than achieve new milestones. It purposefully introduced several faults to test the heat shield, propulsion redundancy, and the relighting of its Raptor engine. The heat shield is among the toughest engineering challenges facing SpaceX. As Elon Musk acknowledged on X in May 2024, a reusable orbital return heat shield is the 'biggest remaining problem' to 100% rocket reusability. The belly of the upper stage, also called Starship, is covered in thousands of hexagonal ceramic and metallic tiles, which make up the heat shield. Flight 10 was all about learning how much damage the ship can accept and survive when it goes through atmospheric heating. During the tenth test, engineers intentionally removed tiles from some sections of the ship, and experimented with a new type of actively cooled tile, to gather real-world data and refine designs. Propulsion redundancy was also put to the test. The Super Heavy booster's landing burn configuration appeared to be a rehearsal for engine failure. Engineers intentionally disabled one of the three center Raptor engines during the final phase of the burn and used a backup engine in its place. That was a successful rehearsal for an engine-out event. Finally, SpaceX reported the in-space relight of a Raptor engine, described on the launch broadcast as the second time SpaceX has pulled this off. Reliable engine restarts will be necessary for deep-space missions, propellant transfers, and possibly some payload deployment missions. The next step is translating Flight 10 data into future hardware upgrades to move closer to routine operations and days when, as Musk envisioned, 'Starship launches more than 24 times in 24 hours.' Read more of this story at Slashdot.
https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/08/27/2153208/with-starship-flight-10-spacex-prioritized-resil...
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