Musk's spaceship was bombed very successfully and immediately tweeted: Mars, here we come.

At 5: 45 a.m. on December 1th, Beijing time, Musk's SpaceX launched another large-scale Starship prototype spacecraft in southern Texas

This round spacecraft, numbered SN8, was the eighth spacecraft in the series. The whole flight lasted about six and a half minutes, and finally it exploded when landing, turning into a wreck all over the place.

Although SN8 exploded, Musk was very happy and sent a tweet saying "Mars, here we come!"

Some bad friends may be about to talk about it. Why are you happy when your own rocket blows up this Musk? Now that rocket technology seems so developed, why will it fail?

In fact, the ultimate goal of the prototype ship of SN series is to make a manned Starship, which is very different from ordinary launch vehicles.

Because it can carry 1 people at the same time and land on Mars successfully.

At present, the only planet that humans have landed on is the moon, and the distance to the moon Earth is only over 38, kilometers, while the nearest distance from Mars is 55 million kilometers.

Because of the different atmospheric environment, gravity and other conditions, the design of spacecraft is naturally quite different, including how to fly for a long distance and how to land.

For example, about half of the probes launched by humans to Mars will be damaged during the landing phase, and it is even more difficult to land a manned spacecraft with more complicated design.

Although the lack of fuel supply during the landing phase of this test flight caused the engine to stall, slow down during the landing, and the explosion ended, the team had obtained all the required data during the previous flight.

He even used cheers like "hell yeah", which is almost equivalent to the Russian shouting "Ula" after drinking vodka, which is enough to show that he is very excited.

In his eyes, this test flight was absolutely successful and worthwhile.

What's special about this flight test compared with the previous ones?

First of all, the preset flying height of SN8 this time is 12.5 kilometers, which is much higher than the previous SN5 jumping 15 meters, and SN8 has reached this height smoothly.

Secondly, this is the first time. At present, the Raptor engine, the most powerful commercial rocket engine on the surface, has carried out three simultaneous flight tests, and all of them worked normally during the whole process.

As the core power of the real Starship in the future, the successful test flight of multiple Raptor engines in parallel this time is of great significance to Starship.

Last but not least, during the flight, SN8 completed a juggling: it changed from a vertical ascending state to a horizontal gliding state in a few seconds.

And after gliding to the designated place, it will quickly change to a vertical state for landing.

SN8 only relies on its own three engines and its own four pneumatic control wings to complete these flexible actions.

these actions are called "belly flop" by SpaceX, which may seem very common to many people and seem to be seen in many movies.

But we should know one thing: Before SN8 was successful, all similar scenes were realized by CG animation, which means it only existed in theory.

SN8 proves that the design of Starship at this stage is enough to switch between the horizontal gliding attitude and the vertical landing attitude and complete the landing.

The reason why it became the most important harvest of this test flight is that this landing method is necessary for Starship to land on Mars.

Although there is an atmosphere on the surface of Mars, its atmospheric density is only about 1% of that of the Earth.

If there is an atmosphere with sufficient density, it means that aerodynamic drag will be generated. However, due to the low density, it is not enough to generate enough drag to support Starship to slow down with a parachute to reach a safe speed for landing.

Therefore, if you want to land on Mars successfully, Starship must have the ability of pneumatic gliding, and at the same time, there must be a deceleration method other than parachute.

So although the launch of SN8 failed to land and exploded in the final stage, it has basically completed all the original test targets, which are important milestones in the development process of Starship.

Looking at SpaceX's SN series prototype spacecraft, only SN1 and SN5 are "alive" so far, and all the others have exploded. Later brothers and sisters still don't know how many ships will be left.

However, the cost control of SN series is very good. To put it bluntly, the workmanship is very rough, which is about one million dollars each.

Look at the stainless steel shell, rough welding marks and the manufacturing process of the green leather train. It can be said that only the engine part is valuable all over the SN series.

So Musk, as one of the richest people in the world, can completely afford to blow up.

These explosions are not completely meaningless. Each explosion can help to eliminate some dangers that may exist on Starship in the future, and finally it will be foolproof in the real manned flight.

What's more, what is hidden under the smoke of explosions again and again is the great progress of SpaceX, which has made countless people see that the dream of immigrating to Mars is no longer so far away.

Maybe, as Musk said, we are really not far from Mars.