Starship launch: SpaceX’s megarocket to deploy fake satellite, test redesign on next flight

On By Littum



CNN
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SpaceX has been turning heads and testing limits with every test flight of Starship, the most powerful rocket system ever constructed. And the latest mission for the nearly 400-foot-tall (121-meter) vehicle is designed to push the envelope even further in a quest to return astronauts to the moon and one day fulfill CEO Elon Musk’s dream of sending the first humans to Mars.

NASA has agreed to pay SpaceX nearly $3 billion to develop Starship, which is intended to serve as a lunar lander that carries humans to the lunar surface as soon as 2027.

The upcoming flight will test an upgrade to Starship aimed at improving the vehicle’s capabilities – and ability to survive the trip home from space – as well as perform an experimental maneuver designed to test how satellites can be launched from this “new generation” of spaceship.

SpaceX, originally scheduled to launch on Wednesday, is now aiming for Thursday because of the weather, the company shared on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that Musk bought in 2022. Thursday is also when Jeff Bezos ‘ Blue Origin will make a second attempt to get its New Glenn rocket off the ground for its maiden flight. Blue Origin is looking to use New Glenn to better compete with SpaceX, which has dominated the global launch market for years.

Liftoff is now on its way at the earliest at 5:00 PM ET (4:00 PM local time) Thursday from SpaceX’s launch pad at its Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas. The opening window remains open for one hour. The company will live stream the event on its website and X.

The Super Heavy rocket booster, the lower part of the vehicle known as the first stage, provides the initial thrust after launch. The booster will fire its 33 Raptor engines for about 2½ minutes to propel the attached unmanned spacecraft vehicle away from the launch pad toward space.

For the first time, one of those 33 Raptor engines will have been in space before: SpaceX said it is reusing an engine recovered from the Super Heavy booster flown during the company’s fifth test flight in October.

Testing the Raptor engines’ ability to fly multiple missions is key for SpaceX: The company intends to reuse every part of the Starship system to reduce costs as well as cut the time between missions.

The highly anticipated launch will mark the seventh flight of the fully integrated Starship system.

Will the Super Heavy booster repeat the landing maneuver in the air?

After burning through most of its fuel, the Super Heavy booster will then detach from the Starship, which will ignite its own engines and begin soaring through space.

The giant booster will steer itself back toward the launch site and attempt a soft touchdown, landing precisely between two massive metal sticks, or “chopsticks,” attached to SpaceX’s launch tower, dubbed “Mechazilla” by CEO Elon Musk.

SpaceX's Super Heavy booster is captured by two massive metal pincers, or

SpaceX stopped the maneuver for the first time in October. However, during the next test flight in November, it aborted a Super Heavy touchdown attempt on terra firma after sensors at the landing zone were damaged during the initial launch. Engineers found that “critical hardware” failed a health check.

Instead, the Super Heavy booster splashed into the Gulf of Mexico and was not recovered.

During the upcoming test, SpaceX will again have the option to change paths mid-flight and perform an ocean splashdown of the booster if safety concerns arise.

But SpaceX indicated its hopes are higher, noting in the a blog post that hardware “upgrades to the launch and capture tower will increase the reliability of booster catch.” The upgrades include better protection of sensors on the Mechazilla, which failed during the test flight in November, prompting the company to divert to a sea landing.

Meanwhile, the Starship spacecraft, or rocket’s upper stage designed to carry satellites or people, will test a number of upgrades the company has made.

For example, the starship’s propulsion system has been modified to increase propellant volume by 25%. The ability to hold more fuel allows the craft to fire its engines for longer. Before this test flight, the Starship spacecraft could hold about 1,200 tons (2.6 million pounds) of oxidizer and fuel. previous said.

SpaceX's Starship megarocket is set for a midweek test flight from Starbase near Brownsville, Texas, on Monday.

In a major first, Starship will also attempt to deploy 10 satellite “simulators,” SpaceX said, that will be “similar in size and weight” to the company’s next-generation Starlink Internet satellites. The simulators will not stay in space, the company noted. Instead, they will travel on a suborbital path, much like the Starship spacecraft, which is intended to splash down in the Indian Ocean about an hour after takeoff.

Before this particular spacecraft reaches its watery demise, however, SpaceX will be testing a few other key targets.

While the Starship is in space, SpaceX will try to reignite one of its engines — and test how the spacecraft can ignite its propulsion system more than once on future missions that require more than one engine burn. The company tested re-igniting a Starship engine during the test flight in November and deemed the attempt a success.

On this seventh flight test of the Integrated Rocket System, SpaceX has made changes to the Starship that include adjustments to the vehicle’s flaps, or the wing-like structures that protrude from the tip of the spacecraft. For this mission, the flaps are smaller and moved further toward the tip of the vehicle, according to SpaceX.

This tweak is designed to reduce stress on the flaps during reentry, or the part of the flight where the Starship begins to dive back into Earth’s atmosphere while still traveling thousands of miles per hour, according to SpaceX. The maneuver can heat the Starship’s exterior to more than 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit (1,427 degrees Celsius), according to previous flight data, and has previously charred the Starship’s flaps into “skeleton hands,” as Musk put it, during the jarring physics of re-entry.

Since test launches of the Starship system began in April 2023, SpaceX has seen the Starship vehicle go from exploding minutes after liftoff to polished flights that end with the vehicle making controlled landings in the ocean. The successful landing of a Super Heavy booster at its launch pad using the “chopstick” capture maneuver in October also marked a monumental step forward.

But the Starship system still has a long way to go before it can return humans to the lunar surface or take the first humans to Mars.

SpaceX has yet to complete a mission to orbit or test how the Starship will rendezvous with another vehicle for refueling in space, a maneuver the company must perfect to provide the vehicle with enough fuel to reach the moon.

Musk said in 2020 that he hopes SpaceX will launch “hundreds of missions” with satellites before attempting a manned Starship flight.

As indicated by Starlink simulators on this latest flight, the company plans to use Starship to deploy batches of its internet beaming satellites in the future.

The company also aims to figure out how to land and eject the Starship spacecraft — instead of losing it to an ocean splashdown without recovery.

Similar to the Super Heavy booster, this upper part of the vehicle is intended to land upright in the arms of the Mechazilla launch tower after flight for quick reuse.

During the broadcast of SpaceX’s test launch in November, SpaceX engineers Jessie Anderson and Kate Tice said the company was nearing completion of construction of the 1 million square foot “Starfactory” at its Starbase facility in South Texas. The goal for that unit is to manufacture Starship vehicles — “hundreds of ships a year,” Anderson said.

SpaceX envisions it will need a large fleet of Super Heavy boosters — and an even larger stable of Starship spacecraft.

That’s because the Starship vehicles “will stay in space for long-duration missions to go to the moon or Mars or become tankers for refueling,” Anderson said. “But the boosters will come back and turn around to launch the next ship.”

“It (production cadence) might sound crazy,” Tice noted. “And that’s because it is.”

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