SpaceX will attempt a fourth test flight of its Starship rocket on Thursday, as the company looks to push development of the mammoth vehicle past new milestones.
Elon Musk's company has a two-hour window, from 8 a.m. ET to 10 a.m. ET, to launch Starship from its Starbase facility near Boca Chica, Texas. If SpaceX cannot launch within that window for technical or weather reasons, the company will postpone the attempt to a later date.
Assuming the launch goes as planned, Starship would reach space and then travel half a circle around Earth before re-entering the atmosphere and falling into the Indian Ocean.
SpaceX's next-generation Starship spacecraft, atop its powerful Super Heavy rocket, lifts off on its third launch from the company's Boca Chica launch pad on an uncrewed test flight, near Brownsville, Texas, USA. USA, March 14, 2024.
Cheney Orr | Reuters
SpaceX has flown the entire Starship rocket system in three spaceflight tests so far, with launches in April 2023, November and March. Each of the test flights achieved more milestones than the last, but each result destroyed the rocket before the flight was over.
The company's rocket flew further on its third test flight, allowing SpaceX to test new capabilities, including opening and closing the payload door once in space (which would be how the rocket will deploy payloads such as satellites in future missions) and fuel transfer during flight. Flight in a NASA demonstration.
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The Starship system is designed to be fully reusable and aims to become a new method of transporting cargo and people beyond Earth. The rocket is also critical to NASA's plan to return astronauts to the moon. SpaceX won a multimillion-dollar contract from the agency to use Starship as a crewed lunar lander as part of NASA's Artemis lunar program.
SpaceX strongly emphasizes the approach of leveraging “what we have learned from previous flights” in its approach to developing Starship. The company says its strategy focuses on a “recursive improvement” of the rocket, where even test flights with excellent results represent progress toward its goal of a fully reusable rocket that can take people to the Moon and Mars.
Musk said last year that he expected the company to spend about $2 billion developing Starship in 2023.
Objectives for the fourth flight
SpaceX's next-generation Starship spacecraft atop its powerful Super Heavy rocket is set for a third launch from the company's Boca Chica launch pad on an uncrewed test flight, near Brownsville, Texas, US ., on March 13, 2024.
Joe Captain | Reuters
There will be no people on board this attempt to reach space with Starship. Company leadership has previously emphasized that SpaceX hopes to fly hundreds of Starship missions before the rocket launches with any crew.
SpaceX will seek to exceed the milestones of the third test flight. The company wrote in an update on its website that the fourth flight “shifts our focus from reaching orbit to demonstrating the ability to return and reuse Starship and Super Heavy.”
“The primary objectives will be to execute a landing and soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico with the Super Heavy booster and achieve a controlled Starship entry,” SpaceX wrote.
The company says it has completed a series of software and hardware changes to Starship, with the goal of increasing the rocket's reliability.
The rocket
Starship is the tallest and most powerful rocket ever launched. Fully stacked atop the Super Heavy booster, Starship measures 397 feet tall and approximately 30 feet in diameter.
The Super Heavy booster, which measures 232 feet tall, is what begins the rocket's journey into space. At its base are 33 Raptor engines, which together produce 16.7 million pounds of thrust, about double the 8.8 million pounds of thrust on NASA's Space Launch System rocket, which was first launched in 2022.
The 165-foot-tall Starship itself has six Raptor engines: three for use in Earth's atmosphere and three for operation in the vacuum of space.
The rocket runs on liquid oxygen and liquid methane. The entire system requires more than 10 million pounds of propellant to launch.
