The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has cleared SpaceX to fly Starship prototypes again, after the company identified the probable cause of the failure of the rocket system\u2019s booster stage during a flight in May. <\/p>\n
SpaceX said over the weekend that the next flight of Starship could happen as soon as this Thursday, July 16. It would be the second-ever launch of the third version, or V3, of Starship. SpaceX also said that this Starship will carry the first third-generation Starlink satellites to space. Previously, Starship had only carried dummy versions of the larger, more powerful internet satellites.<\/p>\n
This is SpaceX\u2019s second test flight of its Starship system, and its first as a public company, testing the market\u2019s appetite for the company\u2019s \u201cfly, fail, fix\u201d approach to rocket development that often ends in fireballs \u2014 or, as CEO Elon Musk calls the explosions: \u201crapid unscheduled disassembly.\u201d SpaceX completed its IPO and publicly listed on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange on June 12, making it one of the 10 most valuable companies in the world<\/a> and raising nearly $86 billion, a record.<\/p>\n SpaceX\u2019s first test launch of the V3 Starship on May 22 was largely successful. The company\u2019s Super Heavy booster lifted the 407-foot rocket into space before the upper stage section separated and deployed 20 satellite simulators along with two modified Starlinks that recorded footage of the Starship exterior.<\/p>\n The new third-generation booster was supposed to return to Earth and perform a simulated landing in the Gulf of Mexico. But its engines didn\u2019t properly re-ignite, and it instead plummeted into the water below. <\/p>\n The problem happened at that moment of booster separation, according to SpaceX and the FAA. SpaceX said in a post published<\/a> over the weekend that \u201cslight differences in engine startup on the ship\u201d caused the Booster to turn 90 degrees in the wrong direction. SpaceX said it has modified this engine startup sequence to allow the booster to \u201cmore reliably flip in the desired direction\u201d and that the booster has been modified to \u201cimprove re-light reliability.\u201d<\/p>\n The FAA said in a statement Monday that the most probable root causes of the Super Heavy booster failure were \u201cheat effects on propulsion system components during the [rocket\u2019s] ascent and erroneous engine alarm system settings.\u201d SpaceX said in its post that it has made changes to Starship\u2019s engine alarm and abort systems that should reduce the chance of a similar failure in the future.<\/p>\n While the first upper stage of Starship V3 was able to successfully deploy its test payload in May and simulate a landing in the Gulf \u2014 a milestone SpaceX had struggled to reach before \u2014 it also did so while losing one of the three Raptor engines that are meant to be used in the vacuum of space. SpaceX said over the weekend that it has made \u201c[s]everal hardware and operational modifications\u201d to prevent this from happening again.<\/p>\n This next Starship test flight will see the company launch the first of its V3 Starlink satellites to space, which are supposed to increase the satellite network\u2019s capacity and user speeds. SpaceX is planning to deploy 20 of these new satellites during the launch. They are designed to connect with the larger Starlink constellation \u201cvia high-capacity lasers\u201d and then burn up in the atmosphere roughly 20 minutes after they are deployed, according to SpaceX. Six of them will be equipped with cameras to photograph the exterior of Starship.<\/p>\n The V3 versions of both Starship and Starlink are crucial to SpaceX\u2019s future. Starlink was the only profitable part of SpaceX\u2019s business in the run-up to its IPO, and SpaceX needs Starship to become a fully reusable rocket system<\/a> to even attempt its galaxy-brained plans for space-based data centers and interplanetary travel.<\/p>\n