SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket is prepared for its second-ever test flight.
SpaceX stacked its latest Starship vehicle on Tuesday (Sept. 5), lifting the Ship 25 upper-stage prototype onto the Booster 9 “Super Heavy” first stage at the corporate’s Starbase site in South Texas.
The work represents a serious milestone ahead of an impending test flight, which SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk says can occur at any time when the required regulatory boxes get checked.
“Starship is able to launch, awaiting FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] license approval,” Musk wrote Tuesday in a post on X (formerly generally known as Twitter) that included a 40-second video capturing highlights of the stacking process.
Related: Relive SpaceX’s explosive 1st Starship test in incredible launch photos
Starship, the largest and strongest rocket ever built, remains to be in development. SpaceX envisions the fully reusable vehicle eventually taking on just about all of its spaceflight duties, from launching satellites to Earth orbit to sending people to the moon and Mars.
A totally stacked Starship has flown only once to this point — in April of this yr, on a test flight from Starbase that aimed to send the upper stage partway around Earth, with a planned splashdown within the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.
That vehicle suffered several problems shortly after launch, nevertheless, including the failure of its first and second stages to separate. Because of this, SpaceX beamed up a self-destruct command, detonating the craft high above the Gulf of Mexico 4 minutes after liftoff.
SpaceX has made a variety of changes to this second Starship vehicle. Perhaps probably the most distinguished is the switch to a “hot staging” strategy, wherein the upper stage lights its engines before it has fully separated from the first-stage booster. That switch required modifications to Booster 9, including the installation of a heat shield and a “vented interstage” to guard it from Ship 25’s fire.
SpaceX has been gearing up for the second flight, whose goals can be much like those of the primary, for some time now. For instance, the corporate has performed two “static fires” with Booster 9, briefly igniting the vehicle’s Raptor engines while it remained anchored to Starbase’s orbital launch mount.
Those two tests occurred on Aug. 6 and Aug. 25. The second was a marked improvement; all 33 of Booster 9’s Raptors lit up, in comparison with 29 in the course of the first static fire, in line with SpaceX.
But there’s more to Starship’s flight readiness than technical progress, as Musk noted in his social media post: The FAA still hasn’t granted a launch license for this second liftoff.
The agency remains to be reviewing the mishap report that SpaceX filed in regards to the April 20 flight, which damaged Starbase’s orbital launch mount and sent dirt, chunks of concrete and other debris raining down on the world around the location.