SpaceX’s Starship made history with its fifth flight, where the booster was caught by mechanical arms back at the launch pad in Texas. Now, the company has announced that another test flight could take place as soon as Nov. 18, less than a month after the historic fifth flight.
The successful recovery of the Starship first stage with “chopsticks” and the on-target splashdown of the upper stage allowed SpaceX to avoid an anomaly investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration. This has allowed the company to move forward with a sixth test flight, with some notable additions to the flight plan.
According to a statement on SpaceX’s website, the first stage, known as Super Heavy, will fly a similar trajectory to the fifth test flight, but with modifications based on learnings from the previous flight. These modifications include additional redundancy to booster propulsion systems, increased structural strength, and a shorter timeline for offloading propellants after a successful catch.
The Starship upper stage will also follow a similar suborbital trajectory as the previous flight, but with the addition of an in-flight relight of one of its six engines. This is a critical milestone in the development of Starship, as it will enable orbital missions and controlled reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.
The successful demonstration of re-relighting Raptors in space will also pave the way for commercial missions and Starlink launches, possibly as early as the first half of next year. These larger Starlink satellites can only fit within Starship’s payload and will provide direct-to-cell Internet capability.
In addition to these milestones, the next flight of Starship will also assess new tiles and other elements of the vehicle’s heat shield. This will include thermal protection experiments and operational changes to test the limits of Starship’s capabilities and gather flight data for future missions.
The flight test will also intentionally fly at a higher angle of attack during the final phase of descent, pushing the limits of flap control and providing valuable data for future landing profiles.
This will be the final flight of the first Starship, as SpaceX plans to retire this prototype and move on to the next phase of development. With each successful test flight, SpaceX is getting closer to its goal of creating a fully reusable, powerful, and versatile spacecraft that can revolutionize space travel.
