Watch Live: SpaceX retries for Starship launch 2 months after explosive test flight
SpaceX scrubbed a Monday launch attempt of its Starship and Super Heavy rocket from Texas, but will try again today to get its eighth suborbital test flight in the air, two months after attempt No. 7 ended explosively over the Atlantic.
The 60-minute launch window opens at 6:30 p.m. EST from SpaceX's Starbase launch site in Boca Chica, Texas. The flight profile once again calls for the Super Heavy booster to fly back to the launch tower for a potential catch by the tower's pivoting arms called chopsticks. The upper stage Starship will continue on halfway around the planet to attempt a water landing in the Indian Ocean off the west coast of Australia.
That Jan. 16 launch saw a successful catch of the Super Heavy booster, but the Starship spacecraft blew up after passing over the Gulf of Mexico with scenes of the streaking debris posted to social media from places like the Turks & Caicos.
The event grounded the in-development rocket, but the Federal Aviation Administration cleared it to launch again as of Feb. 26.
'After completing the required and comprehensive safety review, the FAA determined the SpaceX Starship vehicle can return to flight operations while the investigation into the Jan. 16 Starship Flight 7 mishap remains open,' the FAA stated. 'The FAA is overseeing the SpaceX-led investigation.'
The flight continues progress for Elon Musk's heavy-lift rocket program.
'Several hardware and operational changes have been made to increase reliability of the upper stage,' SpaceX posted on its website.
To support an increased pace of launches in the coming years, SpaceX continues to move forward with a second launch site in Texas and announced $1.8 billion in infrastructure to assist in launch sites from Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. It hopes to launch from the KSC site at Launch Complex 39-A before the end of the year.
For this test launch, though, the objectives that were not reached during the last attempt are on tap again. That includes a test run of payload deployment and reentry experiments that the company hopes will lead to a future launch with the upper stage landing back at the Texas launch site.
Four test payloads will simulate the size of SpaceX's Starlink satellites and follow the same trajectory of the upper Starship stage so they they burn up on reentry.
'Developmental testing by definition is unpredictable,' SpaceX posted. 'But by putting flight hardware in a flight environment as frequently as possible, we're able to quickly learn and execute design changes as we seek to bring Starship online as a fully and rapidly reusable vehicle.'
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