The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has approved SpaceX to fly Starship prototypes again after the company identified the likely cause of the rocket system’s booster stage failure during a flight in May.
SpaceX said over the weekend that the next Starship flight could take place as soon as this Thursday, July 16. It would be the second launch of the third version, or V3, of the Starship. SpaceX also said that this Starship will carry the first third-generation Starlink satellites into space. Previously, Starship had carried only virtual versions of the largest, most powerful Internet satellites.
This is SpaceX’s second test flight of its Starship system and its first as a public company, testing the market’s appetite for the company’s “fly, fail, fix” approach to rocket development that often ends in fireballs — or, as CEO Elon Musk calls the explosions: “rapid unplanned disassembly.” SpaceX completed its IPO and went public on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange on June 12, making it one of the 10 most valuable companies in the world and raising nearly $86 billion, a record.
The first test launch of SpaceX’s V3 Starship on May 22 was largely successful. The company’s Super Heavy booster lifted the 407-foot-long rocket into space before the upper stage parted and deployed 20 satellite simulators along with two modified Starlinks that captured footage of the Starship’s exterior.
The new third-generation booster was to return to Earth and perform a simulated landing in the Gulf of Mexico. But its engines did not restart properly, and instead it fell into the water below.
The problem occurred at the time of booster separation, according to SpaceX and the FAA. SpaceX said in a post published over the weekend, “minor engine starting differences on board” caused the Booster to turn 90 degrees in the wrong direction. SpaceX said it has modified this engine firing sequence to allow the booster to “turn more reliably in the desired direction” and that the booster has been modified to “improve relight reliability.”
The FAA said in a statement Monday that the most likely root causes of the Super Heavy booster failure were “heat effects on propulsion system components during [rocket’s] climb and incorrect engine alarm system settings’. SpaceX said in its post that it has made changes to the Starship’s warning and engine abort systems that will reduce the chance of a similar failure in the future.
While Starship V3’s first upper stage was able to successfully deploy its test payload in May and simulate a landing in the Gulf — a milestone SpaceX has struggled to achieve in the past — it also did so while missing one of three Raptor engines intended for use in the vacuum of space. SpaceX said over the weekend that it was “[s]always hardware and features modifications” to prevent this from happening again.
This next Starship test flight will see the company launch the first of its V3 Starlink satellites into space, which are supposed to increase satellite network capacity and user speeds. SpaceX plans to deploy 20 of these new satellites at launch. They are designed to connect to the larger Starlink constellation “via a high-capacity laser” and then burn up in the atmosphere about 20 minutes after deployment, according to SpaceX. Six of them will be equipped with cameras to photograph the exterior of the Starship.
The V3 versions of both Starship and Starlink are critical to SpaceX’s future. Starlink was the only profitable part of SpaceX’s business in the run-up to its IPO, and SpaceX needs Starship to become a fully reusable rocket system to even attempt its galactic plans for space data centers and interplanetary travel.
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