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Starship’s Successful Test Moves SpaceX One Step Closer to Mars
The vehicle mostly survived launch and reentry—key stepping stones toward operational flights of the largest rocket in history.
“Today’s test was the clearest success to date,” says Abhi Tripathi, a former mission director at SpaceX and now an aerospace engineer at the Space Science Laboratory at UC Berkeley. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in an update from Starbase in April that the company may attempt landing Super Heavy back on the ground rather than at sea if IFT-4 went smoothly, which it appears to have done so, with those two giant chopstick-like arms catching the booster in midair. “From the beginning of the program we’ve designed Starship to land on Mars,” said Jessica Anderson, manufacturing engineering manager at SpaceX, in the livestream of the fourth test, “something we know will take launching millions of pounds of cargo and equipment into space spread across thousands of launches.” IFT-4, it seems, is another step in that direction.
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