SpaceX will launch the fifth test flight of its Starship rocket on Sunday as the company hopes to make an ambitious attempt to capture the rocket’s booster.
MuskThe company has a 30-minute window from 8 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. ET to launch Starship from its Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas. If SpaceX is unable to launch within that window due to weather or technical reasons, the company will delay the launch attempt.
Assuming the launch goes as planned, the starship will reach space, then fly half a circle around the Earth before reentering the atmosphere and splashing down. In addition, the rocket’s “Super Heavy” booster will return and land on the arm of the company’s launch tower after separating from the Starship.
The Federal Aviation Administration on Saturday issued a license to SpaceX to launch Starship’s fifth flight. Earlier than regulators previously estimated.
There won’t be anyone on board the fifth Starship flight.
So far, SpaceX has conducted four aerospace tests of the complete Starship rocket system, with launches scheduled for April and November Last year’s and this year’s March and June. Each test flight achieved more milestones than the last.
The company’s rocket successfully completed its first flight test in June when the Starship crashed into the Indian Ocean after surviving a powerful re-entry. In addition, the rocket’s booster returned as a whole for a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
SpaceX Starship is parked on the launch pad at Starbase near Boca Chica, Texas, ahead of the Starship Flight 5 test on October 12, 2024. The test will involve the return of Starship’s Super Heavy booster to the launch site.
Sergio Flores | AFP | Getty Images
Starship systems are designed to be fully reusable and intended to be a new way to transport cargo and people beyond Earth. The rocket is also critical to NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the moon. SpaceX won a multibillion-dollar contract from the agency to use Starship as a crewed lunar lander as part of NASA’s Artemis lunar program.
SpaceX expects to fly hundreds of Starship missions with any crew before the rocket launches, company leaders said.
SpaceX stresses that it tries to build on “what we’ve learned from previous flights” in developing large rockets.
But the company hopes to launch its fifth flight by October, leading both SpaceX and Musk to criticize the FAA and say “redundant environmental analysis” is hampering the process.
Although the review by the FAA and partner agencies from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service was quicker than expected, SpaceX also had to pay fine To environmental regulators About unauthorized drainage at the launch site in Texas.
The goal of the fifth flight
SpaceX Starship is parked on the launch pad at Starbase near Boca Chica, Texas, ahead of the Starship Flight 5 test on October 12, 2024. The test will involve the return of Starship’s Super Heavy booster to the launch site.
Sergio Flores | AFP | Getty Images
SpaceX will look to surpass the milestone of its fourth test flight.
On this flight, the company hopes to return the booster to the launch site and use a “chopstick” arm on the tower to grab the vehicle. The company believes the ambitious capture method is critical to achieving the goal of the rocket being fully reusable.
“SpaceX engineers have spent years preparing and months testing booster capture attempts, and technicians have invested tens of thousands of hours building the infrastructure to maximize our chances of success,” the company wrote on its website.
The company said the capture attempt needed to meet thousands of criteria or the booster would veer off its return trajectory and splash down to the Gulf Coast instead.
“We accept no compromise when it comes to ensuring the safety of the public and our teams and will only attempt return if conditions are right,” SpaceX said.
Rocket
Starship is the tallest and most powerful rocket ever launched. Starship, fully stacked on Super Heavy boosters, is 397 feet tall and about 30 feet in diameter.
The Super Heavy booster is 232 feet tall and is the starting point for the rocket’s journey into space. There are 33 Raptor engines on the bottom, which can produce a total of 16.7 million pounds of thrust, which is about twice the 8.8 million pounds of thrust of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket. First launch in 2022.
The starship itself is 165 feet tall and has six Raptor engines – three for use in Earth’s atmosphere and three that operate in the vacuum of space.
The rocket is powered by liquid oxygen and liquid methane. The entire system requires more than 10 million pounds of propellant to launch.
