The highest rocket in the world will take off today after unexpected vibrations made it explode during the seventh launch. Starship’s eighth flight will be a repetition of the previous one to try everything Spacex left in the inkwell, and can be followed live.
Date and time of launch. As the two previous flights, the eighth launch of Starship is scheduled to take off from Texas in the afternoon. The objective is that the reentry of the ship takes place in the hours of dawn to capture with more light the sparkling maneuvers.
The launch window opens at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, March 3; local time in Starbase, Texas. In other cities:
- Madrid, Spain (CET, UTC+1): Tuesday, March 4 at 00:30
- Mexico City, Mexico (CST, UTC -6): Monday, March 3 at 5:30 p.m.
- Buenos Aires, Argentina (Art, UTC -3): Monday, March 3 at 8:30 p.m.
- Bogotá, Colombia (COT, UTC -5): Monday, March 3 at 6:30 p.m.
- Lima, Peru (Pet, UTC -5): Monday, March 3 at 6:30 p.m.
- Santiago, Chile (CLST, UTC -3): Monday, March 3 at 8:30 p.m.
- Caracas, Venezuela (Vet, UTC -4): Monday, March 3 at 7:30 p.m.
How to see it live. Spacex will broadcast the live flight through its website and its official X profile. The broadcast will begin 40 minutes before takeoff. On YouTube, the Nasaspaceflight channels, Lab Padre and Everyday Astronaut have also enabled live broadcasts with their own cameras since the surroundings of the launch platform.
In Spanish it will be broadcast by space border, overlooking Baghdad, on the other side of the border, in Mexico. They will also be narrating it in Spanish Mission Control, Manuel Mazzanti and Spacexstorm.
Two pending demonstrations. A “stronger harmonic resonance phenomenon” phenomenon caused a liquid oxygen escape in the flight 7 starship, which ended up disintegrating over the Atlantic Ocean, near the Turkish and Caicos Islands. As a repetition of the failed launch, Spacex hopes to complete a series of demonstrations that were left without doing in January:
- First load deployment: Once the scheduled speed and altitude have been reached, the Starship 34 will turn off its engines, open the gate of its load bay and display four “simulators” of Starlink satellites; wooden models that will be your first useful letter
- First realer in space: although we carry eight flights, Spacex has not yet demonstrated the ability to readever a rush engine in the emptiness of the space, so today it will verify the behavior of the engine that will later serve to move and exorbit the ship in a controlled way
All eyes put in the reentry. More delicate will be the time of the reentry. This could be Starship’s last ameter before trying to catch the ship with the arms of the launch tower, as has already happened twice with the Super Heavy propeller.
However, Spacex still does not have a definitive design for the thermal shield, so it will test different modifications on this flight. Areas of the ship without thermal tiles to measure how the heat fuselage endures the heat. Metal tiles of various kinds, even with active cooling, an addition that had been discarded by its complexity and is again on the table.
New sensors, redesigned front alerons, improvements in propulsion subsystems and a more precise adjustment of the edges between tiles to avoid hot points complete the list of novelties of the ship. The Starship 34 is the second ship of a new version that Spacex calls Starship Block 2, and that more than 100 tons of load will soon be able to launch.
In WorldOfSoftware | Spacex already knows why the last starship exploded and wants to turn the page, so he will try to repeat the flight this Friday
