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Journey to the Center of the Earth

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Journey to the Center of the Earth

By jules verne introduction by kim stanley robinson, part of extraordinary voyages, category: literary fiction.

Oct 01, 1991 | ISBN 9780553213973 | 4-3/16 x 6-7/8 --> | ISBN 9780553213973 --> Buy

Apr 25, 2006 | ISBN 9780553902549 | ISBN 9780553902549 --> Buy

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Oct 01, 1991 | ISBN 9780553213973

Apr 25, 2006 | ISBN 9780553902549

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About Journey to the Center of the Earth

Written almost a century before the daring flights of the astronauts, Jules Verne’s prophetic novel of man’s race to the stars is a classic adventure tale enlivened by broad satire and scientific acumen. When the members of the elite Baltimore Gun Club find themselves lacking any urgent assignments at the close of the Civil War, their president, Impey Barbicane, proposes that they build a gun big enough to launch a rocket to the moon. But when Barbicane’s adversary places a huge wager that the project will fail and a daring volunteer elevates the mission to a “manned” flight, one man’s dream turns into an international space race. A story of rip-roaring action, humor, and wild imagination, From the Earth to the Moon is as uncanny in its accuracy and as filled with authentic detail and startling immediacy as Verne’s timeless masterpieces 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days.

The intrepid Professor Lindenbrock embarks upon the strangest expedition of the nineteenth century: a journey down an extinct Icelandic volcano to the Earth’s very core. In his quest to penetrate the planet’s primordial secrets, the geologist—together with his quaking nephew Axel and their devoted guide, Hans—discovers an astonishing subterranean menagerie of prehistoric proportions. Verne’s imaginative tale is at once the ultimate science fiction adventure and a reflection on the perfectibility of human understanding and the psychology of the questor. As David Brin notes in his Introduction, though Verne never knew the term “science fiction,” Journey to the Centre of the Earth is “inarguably one of the wellsprings from which it all began.”

Also in Extraordinary Voyages

Also by Jules Verne

About Jules Verne

Jules Verne was born in France in 1828 and died in 1905. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel was wildly successful, producing many brilliant novels in the burgeoning genre of science fiction: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to… More about Jules Verne

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“The reason Verne is still read by millions today is simply that he was one of the best storytellers who ever lived.”—Arthur C. Clarke

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Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)

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Highlights From SpaceX’s Starship Test Flight

The powerful rocket, a version of which will carry astronauts to the moon for NASA, launched for the third time on Thursday morning. It achieved a number of milestones before losing contact with the ground.

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Kenneth Chang

Here’s what happened during the third test flight of the most powerful rocket ever built.

Spacex launches starship for third time, the rocket, a version of which will eventually carry nasa astronauts to the moon, traveled almost halfway around the earth before it was lost as it re-entered the atmosphere..

“Five, four, three, two, three, one.” “This point, we’ve already passed through Max-Q, maximum dynamic pressure. And passing supersonic, so we’re now moving faster than the speed of sound. Getting those on-board views from the ship cameras. Boosters now making its way back, seeing six engines ignited on ship. Kate, we got a Starship on its way to space and a booster on the way back to the Gulf.” “Oh, man. I need a moment to pick my jaw up from the floor because these views are just stunning.”

The third try turned out to be closer to the charm for Elon Musk and SpaceX, as his company’s mammoth Starship rocket launched on Thursday and traveled about halfway around the Earth before it was lost as it re-entered the atmosphere.

The test flight achieved several key milestones in the development of the vehicle, which could alter the future of space transportation and help NASA return astronauts to the moon.

This particular flight was not, by design, intended to make it all the way around the Earth. At 8:25 a.m. Central time, Starship — the biggest and most powerful rocket ever to fly — lifted off from the coast of South Texas. The ascent was smooth, with the upper Starship stage reaching orbital velocities. About 45 minutes after launch, it started re-entering the atmosphere, heading toward a belly-flop splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

Live video, conveyed in near real-time via SpaceX’s Starlink satellites , showed red-hot gases heating the underside of the vehicle. Then, 49 minutes after launch, communications with Starship ended, and SpaceX later said the vehicle had not survived the re-entry, presumably disintegrating and falling into the ocean.

Even so, Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA, congratulated SpaceX on what he called a “successful test flight” of the system his agency is counting on for some of its Artemis lunar missions.

SpaceX aims to make both the vehicle’s lower rocket booster and the upper spacecraft stage capable of flying over and over again — a stark contrast to the single-launch throwaway rockets that have been used for most of the space age.

That reusability gives SpaceX the potential to drive down the cost of lofting satellites and telescopes, as well as people and the things they need to live in space.

Completing most of the short jaunt was a reassuring validation that the rocket’s design appears to be sound. Not only is Starship crucial for NASA’s lunar plans, it is the key to Mr. Musk’s pipe dream of sending people to live on Mars.

For Mr. Musk, the success also harks back to his earlier reputation as a technological visionary who led breakthrough advances at Tesla and SpaceX, a contrast with his troubled purchase of Twitter and the polarizing social media quagmire that has followed since he transformed the platform and renamed it X. Even as SpaceX launched its next-generation rocket, the social media company was dueling with Don Lemon , a former CNN anchor who was sharing clips from a combative interview with Mr. Musk.

SpaceX still needs to pull off a series of formidable rocketry firsts before Starship is ready to head to the moon and beyond. Earlier this week, Mr. Musk said he hoped for at least six more Starship flights this year, during which some of those experiments may occur.

But if it achieves them all, the company could again revolutionize the space transportation business and leave competitors far behind.

Phil Larson, a White House space adviser during the Obama administration who also previously worked on communication efforts at SpaceX, said Starship’s size and reusability had “massive potential to change the game in transportation to orbit. And it could enable whole new classes of missions.”

NASA is counting on Starship to serve as the lunar lander for Artemis III, a mission that will take astronauts to the surface of the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. That journey is currently scheduled for late 2026 but seems likely to slide to 2027 or later.

The third flight was a marked improvement from the first two launch attempts.

Last April, Starship made it off the launchpad, but a cascade of engine failures and fires in the booster led to the rocket’s destruction 24 miles above the Gulf of Mexico.

In November, the second Starship launch traveled much farther. All 33 engines in the Super Heavy booster worked properly during ascent, and after a successful separation, the upper Starship stage nearly made it to orbital velocities. However, both stages ended up exploding.

Nonetheless, Mr. Musk hailed both test flights as successes, as they provided data that helped engineers improve the design.

Thursday’s launch — which coincided with the 22nd anniversary of the founding of SpaceX — occurred 85 minutes into a 110-minute launch window. The 33 engines in the booster ignited at the launch site outside Brownsville, Texas, and lifted the rocket, which was as tall as a 40-story building, into the morning sky.

Most of the flight proceeded smoothly, and a number of test objectives were achieved during the flight, like opening and closing the spacecraft’s payload doors, which will be needed to deliver cargo in the future.

SpaceX did not attempt to recover the booster this time, but did have it perform engine burns that will be needed to return to the launch site. However, the final landing burn for the booster, conducted over the Gulf of Mexico, did not fully succeed — an area that SpaceX will attempt to fix for future flights.

SpaceX said the Super Heavy disintegrated at an altitude of about 1,500 feet.

SpaceX engineers will also have to figure out why Starship did not survive re-entry and make fixes to the design of the vehicle.

Even with the partial success of Thursday’s flight, Starship is far from ready to go to Mars, or even the moon. Because of Mr. Musk’s ambitions for Mars, Starship is much larger and much more complicated than what NASA needs for its Artemis moon landings. For Artemis III, two astronauts are to spend about a week in the South Pole region of the moon.

“He had the low price,” Daniel Dumbacher, the executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a former high-level official at NASA, said of Mr. Musk, “and NASA chose to take the risk associated with that configuration hoping that it would work out. And we’ll see if that turns out to be true.”

To leave Earth’s orbit, Starship must have its propellant tanks refilled with liquid methane and liquid oxygen. That will require a complex choreography of additional Starship launches to take the propellants to orbit.

“This is a complicated, complicated problem, and there’s a lot that has to get sorted out, and a lot that has to work right,” Mr. Dumbacher said.

Thursday’s flight included an early test of that technology, moving liquid oxygen from one tank to another within Starship.

Mr. Dumbacher does not expect Starship to be ready by September 2026, the launch date NASA currently has for Artemis III, although he would not predict how much of a delay there might be. “I’m not going to give you a guess because there is way too much work, way too many problems to solve,” he said.

Kenneth Chang and Michael Roston

A rare sight: Starship’s bright orange glow as it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere.

Just past the 45-minute mark of the Starship vehicle’s journey through space on Thursday, something eerie happened. As it drifted high above Earth’s oceans and clouds, the spacecraft’s silvery exterior was overtaken by a brilliant and fiery orange glow.

Starship re-entering Earth's atmosphere. Views through the plasma pic.twitter.com/HEQX4eEHWH — SpaceX (@SpaceX) March 14, 2024

When a spacecraft re-enters the atmosphere, the air beneath it gets hot — hot enough that it turns into a plasma of charged particles as electrons are stripped away from the air molecules. The charged particles create picturesque glows, like neon signs.

But seeing this happen in nearly real-time during a spaceflight is uncommon. That plasma disrupts radio signals, cutting off communication.

Such blackouts happen, for instance, when SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule returns to Earth from the International Space Station with its complement of four astronauts. Mission controllers must wait with bated breath to be reassured that the spacecraft’s heat shield has held up and protected the crew during atmospheric re-entry.

Until Starship succumbed to the intense forces of re-entry on Thursday, SpaceX used its Starlink internet satellites to relay the live video feed. The Starlink satellites are in higher orbits, and sending signals upward — away from the plasma — is easier than trying to communicate through it to antennas on the ground.

But Starship wasn’t the only spacecraft in recent weeks to give us a view of plasma heating. Varda Space, a startup that is developing technology for manufacturing in orbit, had cameras on a capsule it landed on Earth on Feb. 21. Before it parachuted to the ground, its Winnebago capsule recorded a day-glow re-entry. The company retrieved the video recording from the capsule and shared it online:

Here's a video of our capsule ripping through the atmosphere at mach 25, no renders, raw footage: pic.twitter.com/ZFWzdjBwad — Varda Space Industries (@VardaSpace) February 28, 2024

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Jeff Bezos’s rocket company could race SpaceX to the moon.

Which billionaire space company will get to the moon first: Elon Musk’s SpaceX or Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin?

At first glance, SpaceX seems to have a huge head start. It is about to launch the third test flight of Starship. A variation of Starship is scheduled to take NASA astronauts to the surface of the moon as soon as September 2026.

By contrast, Blue Origin has yet to launch anything into orbit, and its contract with NASA for a lunar lander for astronauts is for a mission that is launching in 2030.

But Blue Origin might still get there first. SpaceX faces major challenges with Starship, which is as tall as 16-story building, while Blue Origin plans to send a smaller cargo lander to the moon by the end of next year.

“This lander, we’re expecting to land on the moon between 12 and 16 months from today,” John Couluris, senior vice president of lunar permanence at Blue Origin, said during a n interview on the CBS News program “60 Minutes” this month.

The first launch of the Mark 1 version of the Blue Moon lander is what Blue Origin calls a “pathfinder” to test technologies like the BE-7 engine, the flight computers, avionics and power systems — the same systems that will be used in the much larger Mark 2 lander that will take astronauts to the moon’s surface.

The Mark 1 lander can carry up to three tons of cargo to the lunar surface, but will be small enough to fit inside one of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rockets . New Glenn has yet to fly, but the company says its debut journey will occur later this year.

After Blue Moon Mark 1 is launched into an orbit about 125 miles above Earth’s surface, the lander’s BE-7 engine will propel it toward the moon, slowing it down to enter orbit around the moon and then guiding it to the landing on the surface.

The smaller size means that the Mark 1 lander, unlike Starship, will not need to be refueled before leaving Earth orbit. Demonstrating that refueling technology in orbit will be a key test to validate Starship’s design. Refueling will also be needed for the Blue Moon Mark 2 lander.

Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos have already been beaten to the moon by another billionaire, Kam Ghaffarian , one of the founders of Intuitive Machines, which put a small robotic lander named Odysseus near the lunar south pole in February . That was the first private spacecraft to successfully make it to the moon’s surface in one piece (although its journey had some hiccups ).

As with every American rocket mishap, the Federal Aviation Administration will open an investigation to review what went wrong and what SpaceX needs to do to correct it. But if, as Elon Musk says, there are at least six more Starship flights this year, SpaceX will have opportunities to complete a full test flight.

Starship's third flight went very far, but like its first two flights, it was not a complete success. The landing burn for the Super Heavy booster stage of the rocket — the aim was to “land” it in the Gulf of Mexico — was not fully successful, and the Starship craft did not survive re-entry. But it was marked significant progress, because none of the problems from the earlier flights recurred, and SpaceX engineers now have data to tackle the new problems.

Michael Roston

On the social media site X, Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA, congratulated SpaceX on what he called a “successful test flight” of Starship. The agency is counting on Starship to land astronauts on the moon’s surface as part of the Artemis III mission. Another vehicle, the Orion capsule, is to be used to bring those astronauts back to Earth.

SpaceX says Starship did not survive re-entry, but it achieved several key milestones during the flight. That marks significant progress since the second test flight. Elon Musk has said he hopes there will be a half-dozen Starship flights this year.

SpaceX says a dual loss of communication, both through its own Starlink satellites and other forms spacecraft communications with Earth, suggest that Starship did not survive re-entry. They’re still listening to see if radio contact resumes.

Video is gone. Telemetry is also stuck at a speed 25,707 kilometers per hour and an altitude of 65 kilometers. The reason is not clear.

Starship already has private customers booked for deep space trips.

Starship has not yet done a full orbit of the Earth, but SpaceX already has three private astronaut missions on its manifest for the spacecraft.

The first flight with astronauts aboard will be led by Jared Isaacman who previously bought an orbital trip on a Falcon 9 rocket that was known as Inspiration4 .

Then two other Starship flights will travel around the moon and back, one led by Yusaku Maezawa , a Japanese entrepreneur, and the other by Dennis Tito, who was the first private individual to buy a trip to the International Space Station in 2001.

Back in 2018 when Mr. Maezawa signed up for the lunar flyby, Mr. Musk said Starship would be ready by 2023.

Mr. Maezawa later called the mission ‘dearMoon,’ inviting people to apply for a seat on the trip. Last week, he acknowledged it was not going to happen this year.

“We were planning for our lunar orbital mission ‘dearMoon’ to take place in 2023, but seems like it will take a little longer,” he wrote on the social network X. “We’re not sure when the flight will be, but we will give you all an update once we know more.”

SpaceX is apparently also planning uncrewed cargo flights to the surface of the moon with Starship.

In March last year, a small start-up company, Astrolab, announced that it was sending a Jeep Wrangler-size rover to surface in the south polar region of the moon , and the ride would be a cargo Starship flight that would take it there.

SpaceX did not confirm the news.

This appears to be part of the expanding potential market for Starship. SpaceX also plans to use the rocket for launching its second generation of Starlink internet communications satellites .

Starship is re-entering Earth's atmosphere. We’re seeing the heating on the flaps, with video being transmitted to the ground through SpaceX's Starlink satellites. The view is incredible. Usually the plasma disrupts radio transmissions.

SpaceX skipped the restart of one of the Raptor engines on the upper stage of Starship. It did conduct the propellant transfer test and the opening and closing of the payload door, which means the flight achieved some of its experimental objectives during its coast around the Earth, but not others. Next stop: Re-entry through the atmosphere and a hard bellyflop in the Indian Ocean.

The music on the livestream is more old-fashioned than the ambient beats we’re used to during SpaceX video feeds. But there’s nothing old-fashioned about the views in space from the rocket, which are unreal, but have not always been visible as its connection to the ground comes and goes.

During this period of the flight, Starship is scheduled to perform several tests. The first, opening the payload door, is complete. It will also move several tons of liquid oxygen between two tanks within Starship. That’s a preliminary test for future in-orbit refueling between two Starships, which is critical for sending the vehicle to the moon. Finally, Starship will try to restart one of its Raptor engines in the vacuum of space, something it has not done before.

The payload door of the upper Starship rocket stage is now open. That’s how a future Starship will deploy Starlink satellites, and demonstrating that it works was one of the objectives of today's flight.

The engines on the upper-stage of the rocket successfully completed their burn. Starship is now coasting in space, on a trajectory that will re-enter the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean.

We were watching the booster attempting to land in the Gulf of Mexico. But the camera feed cut off, and we're not sure what actually happened. The upper stage Starship is still continuing on its trajectory toward the Indian Ocean.

The Super Heavy booster stage of the rocket appears to be headed back to Earth. During the last attempt, the booster exploded at this point, so it looks like SpaceX has fixed that issue.

The large Super Heavy booster stage has separated from the Starship upper stage, which is on its way to space. The flight is looking good.

All 33 Raptor engines in the booster are working fine. So far everything looks good.

Less than 2 minutes until liftoff. Propellant tanks are full, and wind will not prevent an on-time liftoff.

Starship is less than 10 minutes away from its third launch. The countdown is going smoothly.

What will happen during Starship’s third test flight.

For its third test flight, Starship aims to fly part of the way around the Earth, starting from SpaceX’s launch site in Boca Chica Village, Texas, and splashing down in the Indian Ocean.

The earlier test flights — both of which ended in explosions — aimed to come down in waters off Hawaii. SpaceX said it had set the new flight path to allow for safe testing of things it hadn’t done before with the Starship vehicle.

The journey will start at the site that SpaceX calls Starbase, which is a few miles north of where Texas and Mexico meet along the Gulf of Mexico. The rocket, nearly 400 feet tall, will be mounted next to a launch tower that is about 480 feet tall. It will be filled with methane and liquid oxygen propellants during the hours before liftoff.

Three seconds before launch, computers will begin to ignite the 33 engines in the Super Heavy rocket booster beneath Starship.

Starship and Super Heavy will begin their ascent over the Gulf. At 52 seconds into the flight, SpaceX says, the vehicle will experience the heaviest atmospheric stress of its trip, a moment flight engineers call max-q.

If the stainless steel spacecraft survives that stress, the next key moment will occur 2 minutes and 42 seconds into flight, when most of the Super Heavy booster’s engines power down. Seconds later, the upper Starship vehicle will begin “hot-staging,” or lighting up its engines before separating from Super Heavy.

Super Heavy’s journey will end about seven minutes after launch. SpaceX would typically aim to return the massive rocket booster to the launch site for a vertical landing. But for the test flight, the spent Super Heavy will perform a series of maneuvers before firing its engines one last time to slow its descent into the Gulf of Mexico.

As Super Heavy is descending, Starship will be gaining altitude. About eight and a half minutes into its flight, its engines will switch off. It will then begin coasting around the Earth.

While floating through space, Starship will attempt several things that the spacecraft has never done. Nearly 12 minutes into the flight, it will open a door that in the future could deploy satellites and other cargo into space. About 12 minutes later, it will transfer propellants from one tank to another while in space, a technique needed for future journeys to the moon and beyond. Then, 40 minutes into the flight, Starship will relight one if its engines while in space.

If the spacecraft makes it through those experiments, the conclusion of Starship’s journey will start at about the 49-minute mark. The spacecraft is set to pivot horizontally into a belly-flop to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere. If it survives the extreme temperatures, Starship will splash down 64 minutes after it left Texas. The company has said in the past that it expects the belly-flop ocean landing to end in an explosion .

After SpaceX completes its testing campaign, future Starship flights will return to the Texas Starbase site after they complete their missions in orbit. SpaceX is also building a launch tower for Starship at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where flights could one day launch and land, including the Artemis III mission that NASA plans to use to return American astronauts to the moon’s surface.

SpaceX has started the company’s official live video stream from Texas, a sign that it is serious about igniting the rocket in about 20 minutes. You can watch it in the video player embedded above.

What went right and wrong during the 2nd Starship test flight.

The second test flight of Starship in November got a lot higher and faster than the first attempt seven months earlier.

During the first launch outside Brownsville, Texas, in April last year, things went wrong from the start — the exhaust of the engines of the Super Heavy booster excavated a hole beneath the launchpad, sending pieces of concrete flying up to three-quarters of a mile away and a plume of dust drifting 6.5 miles, blanketing the nearby town of Port Isabel. Several of the booster engines failed, and the upper stage never separated from the booster.

Instead, the rocket started making loop-de-loops before the flight termination system destroyed it.

During the second test flight , all 33 of the booster engines worked during ascent. A water deluge system protected the launchpad. The upper Starship stage separated from the booster and then made it most of the way to orbital velocity. However, the journeys of both the booster and the upper Starship stage still ended in explosions.

For the booster, as it dropped away from the upper stage, 13 of the 33 engines fired again to guide it toward the landing location. Although this particular booster was not going to be recovered, SpaceX wanted to test the re-entry techniques that are similar to what it currently uses for its smaller Falcon 9 rockets. However, something went wrong. Several engines shut down and then one blew up, causing the destruction of the booster.

In an update posted on the company’s website on Feb. 26 , SpaceX said the most likely cause of the booster failure was a blockage of a filter where liquid oxygen flowed to the engines. The company said it had made design changes to prevent that from happening again.

The upper stage continued upward for seven minutes after stage separation. This was itself an achievement because the company completed a step called hot-staging, during which the upper-stage engines ignite before the stage detaches from the Super Heavy booster.

Because the spacecraft was empty, extra liquid oxygen was loaded to simulate the weight of a future payload it could carry to orbit. But when the extra oxygen was dumped, a fire started, disrupting communication between the spacecraft’s flight computers. The computers shut down the engines and then set off the flight termination system, destroying the spacecraft.

The upper Starship stage reached an altitude of about 90 miles and a speed of about 15,000 miles per hour. For a spacecraft to reach orbit, it needs to accelerate to about 17,000 miles per hour.

Frost lines have appeared on Starship and the Super Heavy booster as methane and liquid oxygen flow into the rocket’s tanks.

It’s sunrise in Cameron County, Texas, but weather reports show cloudy conditions persist. We’ll see if weather is going to keep Starship on the beach, but SpaceX says it has started loading propellants into the rocket.

Launch time is now 9:25 a.m. Eastern. SpaceX says winds are still a concern that could cause a liftoff to be called off, but it will go ahead with loading of propellants in the rocket.

SpaceX pushed the launch time back a little more, to 9:10 a.m. Eastern. They have until 9:50 to try today.

SpaceX has just announced the new target launch time is 9:02 a.m. Eastern, and the company said on X that it is clearing some boats from a safety zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Cameras from a number of space enthusiast websites like NASASpaceflight that are pointing at the rocket show there is still no frost on its side, so the loading of ultracold methane and liquid oxygen propellants has not yet begun.

As SpaceX prepares for its third flight of Starship, other space efforts have experienced difficulties this week. On Wednesday, Kairos, a rocket from a Japanese startup called Space One, exploded moments into its first launch attempt. And Xinhua, a Chinese state news agency, said on Thursday that two Chinese satellites were lost after a rocket failed to reach the planned orbit.

In a posting on the social media site X, SpaceX says that it is aiming for launch at 8:30 a.m. Eastern time, or 30 minutes into the 110-minute launch window. There is a 70 percent chance of favorable weather. There have been concerns of high winds, especially at higher altitudes.

What is Starship?

For Elon Musk, Starship is really a Mars ship. He envisions a fleet of Starships carrying settlers to the red planet in the coming years.

And for that eventual purpose, Starship, under development by Mr. Musk’s SpaceX rocket company , has to be big. Stacked on top of what SpaceX calls a Super Heavy booster, the Starship rocket system will be, by pretty much every measure, the biggest and most powerful ever.

It is the tallest rocket ever built — 397 feet tall, or about 90 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty including the pedestal.

And it has the most engines ever in a rocket booster: The Super Heavy has 33 of SpaceX’s powerful Raptor engines sticking out of its bottom. As those engines lift Starship off the launchpad in South Texas, they will generate 16 million pounds of thrust at full throttle.

NASA’s new Space Launch System rocket , which made its first flight in November 2022, holds the current record for the maximum thrust of a rocket: 8.8 million pounds. The maximum thrust of the Saturn V rocket that took NASA astronauts to the moon during the Apollo program was relatively paltry: 7.6 million pounds.

An even more transformative feature of Starship is that it is designed to be entirely reusable. The Super Heavy booster is to land much like those for SpaceX’s smaller Falcon 9 rockets, and Starship will be able to return from space belly-flopping through the atmosphere like a sky diver before pivoting to a vertical position for landing.

That means all of the really expensive pieces — like the 33 Raptor engines in the Super Heavy booster and six additional Raptors in Starship itself — will be used over and over instead of thrown away into the ocean after one flight.

That has the potential to cut the cost of sending payloads into orbit — to less than $10 million to take 100 tons to space, Mr. Musk has predicted.

Starship and Super Heavy are shiny because SpaceX made them out of stainless steel, which is cheaper than using other materials like carbon composites. But one side of Starship is coated in black tiles to protect the spacecraft from the extreme heat that it will encounter if it gets far enough in its flight to re-enter the atmosphere.

Here is what to know about Thursday’s SpaceX test flight.

The third try was closer to the charm for Elon Musk and SpaceX, as the company’s flight test of the mammoth Starship rocket launched on Thursday and traveled almost halfway around the Earth before it was lost as it re-entered the atmosphere.

The flight achieved some key milestones in the development of the vehicle, which could alter the future of space transportation and help NASA return astronauts to the moon.

This particular flight did not, by design, make it all the way around the Earth. At 9:25 a.m. Eastern time, Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever to fly, lifted off from the coast of South Texas. About 45 minutes later it started its re-entry, but communications were lost a few minutes after that. The company said the rocket was lost before attempting to splash down in the Indian Ocean, a sign that more work needs to be completed on the vehicle.

That reusability gives SpaceX the potential to drive down the cost of lofting satellites and space telescopes, as well as people and the things they need to live in space.

Here’s what else to know:

Thursday’s flight demonstrated new capabilities for Starship. In addition to reaching orbital speeds, the Starship vehicle opened and closed its payload door and managed to move several tons of liquid oxygen between two tanks within the rocket, a key test needed for future missions.

The Starship system consists of two stages — the Super Heavy rocket booster and the upper-stage spacecraft, which is also called Starship. The company intends both to be fully reusable in the future. Read more about Starship .

Thursday’s launch was the third of Starship. Here’s a recap of what happened last time .

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Journey to the Center of the Earth

2008, Kids & family/Adventure, 1h 33m

What to know

Critics Consensus

Modern visuals and an old fasioned storyline make this family adventure/comedy a fast-paced, kitschy ride. Read critic reviews

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Journey to the center of the earth videos, journey to the center of the earth   photos.

During an expedition to Iceland, professor Trevor Anderson (Brendan Fraser), his nephew Sean (Josh Hutcherson) and their guide, Hannah (Anita Briem), get trapped in a cavern. As they follow their only escape route deeper and deeper below the Earth's surface, they pass through strange places and encounter incredible creatures, including dinosaurs. But as volcanic activity around them increases, they realize they must find their way out -- soon.

Rating: PG (Some Scary Moments|Intense Adventure Action)

Genre: Kids & family, Adventure, Action, Fantasy, Sci-fi

Original Language: English

Director: Eric Brevig

Producer: Charlotte Huggins , Beau Flynn

Writer: Michael D. Weiss , Jennifer Flackett , Mark Levin

Release Date (Theaters): Jul 11, 2008  wide

Release Date (Streaming): May 1, 2011

Box Office (Gross USA): $101.7M

Runtime: 1h 33m

Distributor: Warner Bros.

Production Co: New Line Cinema, Walden Media

Cast & Crew

Brendan Fraser

Trevor Anderson

Josh Hutcherson

Sean Anderson

Anita Briem

Hannah Ásgeirsson

Seth Meyers

Prof. Alan Kitzens

Jean-Michel Pare

Max Anderson

Jane Wheeler

Elizabeth Anderson

Frank Fontaine

Giancarlo Caltabiano

Gum-chewing Girl

Garth Gilker

Sigurbjorn Ásgeirsson

Eric Brevig

Michael D. Weiss

Jennifer Flackett

Toby Emmerich

Executive Producer

W. Mark McNair

Tripp Vinson

Andrew Lockington

Original Music

Charlotte Huggins

Chuck Shuman

Cinematographer

David Sandefur

Production Design

Paul Martin Smith

Film Editing

Dirk Westervelt

Steven Rosenblum

Elisabeth Rudolph

Mario Davignon

Costume Design

Michele Laliberte

Supervising Art Direction

Eve Boulonne

Set Decoration

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Scientists reveal never-before-seen map of the Milky Way's central engine (image)

"The center of the Milky Way and most of the space between stars is filled with a lot of dust, and this is important for our galaxy's life cycle."

The Milky Way is our home galaxy, but how well do we actually know it? As part of a NASA-funded project, a team led by Villanova University researchers has obtained a never-before-seen view of the central engine at the heart of our galaxy.

The new map of this central region of the Milky Way , which took four years to assemble, reveals the relationship between magnetic fields at the heart of our galaxy and the cold dust structures that dwell there. This dust forms the building blocks of stars, planets, and, ultimately, life as we know it. The central engine of the Milky Way drives this process. 

That means a clearer picture of dust and magnetic interactions builds a better understanding of the Milky Way and our place within it. The team's findings also have implications beyond our galaxy, offering glimpses of how dust and magnetic fields interact in the central engines of other galaxies.

Related: How do we know what the Milky Way looks like?

Understanding how stars and galaxies form and evolve is a vital part of the origin story of life — but, until now, the interaction of dust and magnetic fields in this process has been somewhat overlooked, especially within our own galaxy.

"The center of the Milky Way and most of the space between stars is filled with a lot of dust, and this is important for our galaxy's life cycle," David Chuss, research team leader and a physics professor at Villanova University, told Space.com. "What we looked at was light emitted from these cool dust grains produced by heavy elements forged in stars and dispersed when those stars die and explode."

A complicated picture of Milky Way magnetic fields

In the heart of the Milky Way exists a region called the central molecular zone , which is packed with an estimated 60 million solar masses of dust. This vast reservoir of dust has a temperature of around minus 432.7 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 258. 2 degrees Celsius). That's just a few degrees above absolute zero (minus 460 Fahrenheit), the hypothetical temperature at which all atomic movement would cease. 

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Also located at the heart of the Milky Way is hotter gas that has been stripped of its electrons, or "ionized," and exists as a state of matter called " plasma ."

"Radio wave observations of this region have these beautiful vertical elements in them that trace magnetic fields in the hot, ionized plasma component of the center of the Milky Way," Chuss said. "We tried to figure out what relationship this has to the cool dust component.

The team also wanted to know how this cool dust aligns with the magnetic fields at the heart of the Milky Way, which would also reveal how these magnetic fields are orientated. Such orientation is referred to as their "polarization."

Chuss and colleagues received funding from NASA to investigate this dusty central zone using the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), which was a telescope that circled the globe at an altitude of 45,000 feet (13,716 meters) aboard a Boeing 747 plane.

The project's Far-Infrared Polarimetric Large Area CMZ Exploration (FIREPLACE) created an infrared map that spans around 500 light-years across the center of the Milky Way over nine flights.

Using measurements of the polarization of the radiation emitted from dust that is aligned with magnetic fields, the intricate structure of those magnetic fields themselves was inferred by the team. This was then overlaid onto a three-color map that shows warm dust with a pink hue and cool dust clouds in blue. The image also shows radio-wave-emitting filaments in yellow.

"This is a journey, not a destination, but what we've found is this is a very complicated thing. The directions of the magnetic field vary all across the clouds at the center of the Milky Way," Chuss explained. "This is the first step in trying to figure out how the field that we see in the radiowaves across these large organized filaments may relate to the rest of the dynamics of the center of the Milky Way."

Chuss explained that this complicated picture of magnetic fields was something that he and the FIREPLACE team had expected to see with the new SOFIA map; the observations agreed with smaller-scale infrared and radio wave observations previously made of the heart of the Milky Way. Where this new map, however, really comes into its own is the sheer scale. It manages to reveal some never-before mapped regions. The fine detail woven into it is stunning as well.

— New Milky Way map reveals the magnificent messiness of our galaxy

— The Milky Way galaxy may be a different shape than we thought

— 3.3 billion Milky Way objects revealed by colossal astronomical survey

"I think we have a lot of work to do to ultimately come up with the conclusions here. One of the things that I think is interesting about it is some of the fields appear to be in the same direction as the filaments in the radio waves, and some of them appear to be consistent with the direction of the dust further out in the disk," Chuss said. "It's a tantalizing hint that maybe the large-scale field in the disk of our galaxy and the vertical field that we've noticed in the center of the Milky Way are connected."

He and the team will continue to analyze the SOFIA data over the course of the next two years, and he hopes that this work will inspire theorists to come up with some new models to explain what is happening at the heart of our galaxy.

A preprint version of the SOFIA data is published on the paper repository arXiv.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Robert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. whose articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space, Newsweek and ZME Science. He also writes about science communication for Elsevier and the European Journal of Physics. Rob holds a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy from the U.K.’s Open University. Follow him on Twitter @sciencef1rst.

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