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Like the ruins of a dead civilization: Elon Musk's SpaceX has recovered a part of its Starship megastar from the sea. Photo.
Elon Musk, founder and CEO of the American company SpaceX, posted a photo of damaged equipment being lifted from the ocean on the X network. According to Musk, this is part of the first stage launch vehicle used during the last test flight of the Starship.
SpaceX is developing the Starship Super Heavy to deliver people and payloads to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. However, so far, the mega rocket is undergoing tests that do not always end in complete success, Space.com writes.
"Like the ruins of a futuristic, long-dead civilization," Elon Musk wrote in a comment to the photo.
And subscribers compared the wreckage of the megamissile to a mythical sea monster: "It looks like a kraken."
However, these are the remains of SpaceX's super-powerful spacecraft, which consists of two stainless steel elements - a huge first-stage rocket carrier called Super Heavy and a 50-meter-high upper stage spacecraft called Starship or simply Ship.
According to SpaceX, both stages are designed to be fully reusable. They are equipped with SpaceX's new powerful Raptor engines - 33 for Super Heavy and six for Ship.
Starship, which stands 122 meters tall when fully operational, has completed four test flights to date, all from SpaceX's South Texas base. These missions launched in April and November 2023 and March and June of this year.
The super-heavy part shown in the published photo belongs to the fourth launch, which SpaceX declared successful. After all, the ship reached orbital speed and, together with Super Heavy, survived the descent through the Earth's atmosphere and hit the waves unharmed - the ship in the Indian Ocean and Super Heavy in the Gulf of Mexico.
But these crashes did cause some damage, as the published photo shows. The Super Heavy piece shown in the image has 14 engines. It is not known if SpaceX has recovered the other 19 from the ocean floor.
SpaceX is preparing to launch the fifth Starship test flight. According to the company, the rocket has been ready for flight since early August, but it needs to wait for approval from the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which is likely to be in late November. The FAA says they need more time to assess the potential environmental impact of the launch and to review the modifications to the Starship vehicle and flight plan changes that SpaceX made after the last test.
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