SpaceX’s huge Starship rocket could fly again before the summer is out.
A totally stacked Starship, the most important and strongest rocket ever built, launched for the primary time ever on April 20.
The test flight, from SpaceX’s Starbase site in South Texas, aimed to send Starship’s upper-stage spacecraft most of the best way around Earth. But that did not occur; while the vehicle notched some significant milestones, it also experienced several serious problems, and SpaceX sent a self-destruct command just a few minutes after liftoff.
Ever since, SpaceX fans have been wondering when Starship will launch again. And company founder and CEO Elon Musk just gave them something to look ahead to, saying via Twitter yesterday (June 13) that the corporate is shooting for one more liftoff six to eight weeks from now.
Related: Relive SpaceX’s explosive 1st Starship test flight in these incredible launch photos
That timeline could also be ambitious, nonetheless, given the quantity of prep work required ahead of the second flight.
For instance, the liftoff damaged Starbase’s orbital launch mount, blasting out an enormous crater beneath it and sending chunks of concrete flying, together with an enormous cloud of dust and other debris. SpaceX has been developing and testing a water-cooled steel plate that may sit beneath the mount and forestall a reoccurrence of this problem, Musk said recently.
The corporate could also face some regulatory hurdles. A coalition of environmental groups is currently suing the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the body that issued Starship’s launch license, saying the agency didn’t properly assess the potential damage that the enormous vehicle could inflict on the South Texas ecosystem and the human communities around Starbase.
It is also price noting that “six to eight weeks” isn’t a brand new Starship prediction for Musk. He laid out an analogous timeline for the subsequent test flight during an April 29 discussion of the debut launch on Twitter Spaces (though in that case he was referring to the projected readiness of Starbase and Starship, not predicting when the flight would occur).
The 394-foot-tall (120 meters) Starship consists of a first-stage booster called Super Heavy and a 165-foot-tall (50 meters) upper-stage spacecraft called Starship. Each of those elements are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, the important thing breakthrough that Musk thinks will revolutionize spaceflight.
NASA is a believer in the brand new space transportation system; the agency chosen Starship as the primary crewed lander for its Artemis moon program. Starship is slated to deliver NASA astronauts to the lunar surface as soon as 2025, if current schedules hold (though there is definitely a probability they may not).