Donald Trump joins Elon Musk for SpaceX Starship rocket launch | Donald Trump

Donald Trump joined Elon Musk in Texas on Tuesday to watch a successful test launch of SpaceX's Starship rocket, a demonstration of the unprecedented closeness between the world's richest man and the new president of the United States.

Trump tweeted before the launch: “I'm traveling to the great state of Texas to witness the launch of the largest object ever lifted, not only into space, but simply by taking off from the ground.” Good luck to @ElonMusk and the Great Patriots involved in this incredible project!

Musk, founder and chief executive of SpaceX, said he was honored that Trump was present at the launch. Texas Senator Ted Cruz was also present.

After the rocket took off, it released its first stage booster back to Earth. SpaceX forwent returning the boosters to the launch site, as was done after a launch last month in a dramatic recovery, and instead opted for a fiery splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.

No reason was immediately given for the booster setback, but the Starship upper stage accomplished the mission's primary objective, a long suborbital flight to evaluate hardware and software upgrades from previous flights This year. Video of the landing showed it exploding in a ball of fire as it hit the water. SpaceX will recover the stage for evaluation, but no matter what it discovers, it will not consider its failure to capture the booster a failure.

The upper stage crashed into the Indian Ocean 1 hour 5 minutes after liftoff at 4:00 p.m. CT and appeared to split into two halves. The segments were expected to sink and will not be recovered.

Meanwhile, Trump will soon be tasked with making some very consequential decisions about the future of American spaceflight. SpaceX already benefits from billions of dollars in U.S. government contracts and is poised to get more. The company's Falcon rockets and Dragon capsules provide NASA with the only crew-capable craft for flights to the International Space Station, and the Starship landing system was chosen to return humans to the Moon, a mission currently planned for 2026.

While Musk has been nearly inseparable from Trump since the election, calling himself first buddy and apparently enjoying outsized influence in shaping the Republicans' second term, their joint appearance at SpaceX's Starbase complex in Boca Chica for the launch of the sixth test flight of the spacecraft was more than reciprocal. cheerleader.

Trump has yet to decide who he wants to be NASA's next administrator as the agency approaches a pivotal moment in its history, and with Musk insisting he can get humans to Mars from four years from now, government support, and more particularly in dollars, will be crucial. . Additionally, as speculation grows that NASA is considering abandoning its own Space Launch System rocket program under the Trump administration and relying more on the private sector for its return to the lunar surface and future missions to Mars, Musk could emerge with an even stronger hand. .

The founder of the most innovative space company of this century, Elon Musk, successfully used his wealth, time and energy to help elect Donald Trump as president of the United States, Eric wrote this month Berger, space editor at Ars Technicas. It's entirely possible that SpaceX's sitting CEO is the nation's most important space policy advisor, conflicts be damned.

Trump, meanwhile, has made no secret of his desire for humans to achieve the very ambitious goal of reaching Mars during his second term, and he is said to be eager to see for himself the progress made on what is the world's most powerful rocket when Tuesday's launch was the Starship's sixth flight, closely following its first fully successful test in June, when it rose to nearly 130 miles altitude and circled of Earth before crashing intact into the Indian Ocean.

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A fifth flight last month offered the spectacle of capturing the recyclable rocket booster from the Starship's first stage at the Texas launch site in a pair of giant stirrups known as wands.

SpaceX was unable to repeat the capture Tuesday during Flight 6, announcing in a tweet that it was instead sending the booster toward a water landing in the Gulf of Mexico.

A fireball was visible as it landed, but later video footage showed the booster, or at least a significant remnant of it, floating on the surface. The company's philosophy is to integrate consumable prototypes on the path to longer-term progress and discovery. Changes from the previous flight included the removal of more than 2,000 heat shield tiles on the spacecraft's nose and elsewhere to evaluate revised streamlining capabilities. In addition to the heat shield experiment, SpaceX successfully sent a command to Starship to reignite one of its Raptor engines in space for the first time.

SpaceX intends to launch future Starship test missions almost monthly, including from Cape Canaveral in Florida, possibly starting next year. With approximately 16 million pounds of thrust and the ability to lift up to 165 tons from the Earth's surface, Starship is almost twice as powerful as the Saturn V rockets that sent 12 astronauts to the Moon between 1969 and 1972.

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