SpaceX’s Starship is scheduled to launch on Tuesday, May 27, after the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) gave the go-ahead this week.
This will be the ninth test flight of this heavy launch vehicle, a key part of SpaceX’s mission to bring humans to Mars and a critical component of NASA‘s Artemis lunar program.
The seventh test flight in January ended when the Starship’s upper stage exploded about eight and a half minutes after launch. A similar fate befell the rocket during the eighth test flight in March. Everything went smoothly for its super-heavy booster, which was successfully picked up by the 400-foot-tall Mechazilla tower’s “sticks.” But at the end of the upper stage’s ascent, six of the Raptor’s nine engines failed, causing the ship to crash. SpaceX lost contact with the Rocket 9 a few minutes after the launch, and it exploded shortly afterward.
The incident prompted the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to conduct a safety review of the Starship. This week, the agency announced that SpaceX is ready for its next test flight, the ninth in a row.
“The FAA has conducted a comprehensive safety analysis of SpaceX Starship Flight 8 and determined that the company has satisfactorily addressed the causes of the accident, and therefore, the Starship can return to flight,” the agency said in an emailed statement. “The FAA will verify that SpaceX has completed all corrective actions.”
SpaceX says it has identified and resolved the problems. Although the Super Heavy returned safely to the Mechanical Base, one of its engines failed during the launch, the company explained. The most likely cause was overheating of the engine ignition device, which, according to SpaceX, was eliminated by adding additional insulation.
The company attributed the loss of the Starship’s upper stage to a hardware failure in one of the central engines, which led to an unexpected fuel ignition. SpaceX conducted “extensive” ground tests to better understand the cause of the malfunction and eliminated it with several key fixes to the ship’s engines. These included tightening key connections, implementing a new nitrogen purge system, and improving the fuel drain system.
SpaceX also gave a nod to the upcoming Raptor 3s, the latest iteration of the Raptor engine. The company said that this new engine will have additional reliability improvements to address the issue associated with the Flight 8 crash.
The FAA’s approval shows that the company is confident in these fixes – but with conditions. The agency has increased the size of no-fly zones – areas established before a launch to prevent other aircraft from flying through designated airspace – in the United States and other countries as SpaceX plans to use a previously launched super-heavy booster for the first time on this Starship flight.
The Danger Zone for Flight 9 will cover approximately 1,600 nautical miles, extending east from Starbase, Texas, through the Florida Straits, including the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands. This is a much larger danger zone than the one defined for the last test flight, which covered 885 nautical miles. When the Starship exploded, nearly 240 flights were disrupted.
Next week, all eyes will be on SpaceX as the company tries to get the Starship program back on track. These back-to-back setbacks have pushed the program several months behind schedule. Regardless of whether the test flight of the 9 leads to another explosive accident or goes off without a hitch, it will mark a critical moment for SpaceX.
