SpaceX test flight has launched!

NBC's Rory O'Neill reports on the newest rocket from Elon Musk which blasted off last night. We'll see how well it does

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Six forty five in the morning. It's Tuesday, October fourteenth,
So glad you're listening Mike Elliott Columbus's Morning News. Over
to the Legacy Retirement Group dot com phone line. That
is where we find our friend Rory O'Neil, NBC News Radio.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Roryo.

Speaker 1 (00:11):
I don't feel like making decisions today, So in the
rare case of the reporter gets to choose the story,
what do you find more interesting? And I have a
hunch I know where this is going to go. Government
government shutdown day fourteen, no end in sight or the
SpaceX launch in the world's largest rocket.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Well, yeah, Minja, just go back and see what I
said yesterday about the shutdown. It's the same. So thank
you SpaceX in Texas. Star Based, Texas is the name
of the town. By the way, Yes, Elon Musk had
a town named star Base in Texas, and that's where
they launched this four hundred and four foot tall starship

(00:56):
on a test flight. Test flight number eleven significant for
a bunch of reasons. Probably though, the most successful test
of this new rocket so far, and that's really why
they're celebrating. It was in two stages. The bottom half
has all the engines. The top half is the actual
Starship itself. The bottom half it was its second flight.
It splashed down on the Gulf of America after doing

(01:19):
its thing and sending the Starship on its way, and
then Starship was able to splash down in the Indian
Ocean pretty close to Australia. On the money when it
comes to targeting, how the landing came in And yeah,
so it's pretty exciting getting us closer to using Starship
to put people on board and that heavy payload which
it's really designed to character So.

Speaker 1 (01:39):
That was my next question. There were no humans aboard
these just yet. So the purpose was just to make
sure that the rocket was functional by itself before we
strap a man or a woman in there exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
And look, there's a lot of boxes that have to check.
So this time around, they were putting the heat shield
through its paces and having it essentially re entered the
atmosphere in a different way to really stress the rocket
to make sure it could handle some of those g
forces as it's coming through the atmosphere and then and
the temperatures that go along with it. So they were
really trying to rough this thing up to test it

(02:12):
as much as they could and so far, well, the
fact that it did what it was supposed to do,
just that it survived is great. But there's an awful
lot of data they collected that's going to take a
long time to go through. But Elon musk All smiled
last night.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
We hear a lot about the commercial space industry, which
is really sort of kind of nudged NASA out of
the way. Does NASA have a role in.

Speaker 2 (02:32):
This, Well, yeah, because NASA is So if we're talking
commercial then NASA is the number one customer. So what
NASA has been doing is trying to fund this stuff
in order to get this commercial space program going. And
this is what was their intent, saying, let's put this
over to the private sector much the same way and

(02:53):
being in your part of the country, much the same
way they funneled money to the post office, funnel money
to aviation to get airmail going. They're doing the same
thing that the space industry to get the space industry going.
New Glenn is going to be a brand new rocket
launching in a month or two. It's almost as big
as Starship. It's by Jeff Bezos, so it's new. Starship

(03:15):
is new we're going to have a test flight of
Artemis two, the NASA mission to the Moon that's coming
up in February at the Earliers. So yeah, there's a
lot going on.