Last month, SpaceX pulled off an incredible feat. On the fifth test flight of its enormous Starship rocket, the booster stage returned to the launchpad and was caught in midair by two large mechanical arms on the launch tower.
Starship’s sixth test flight will try to repeat that feat and accomplish some other goals, too. The president-elect, Donald J. Trump, is also expected to be in attendance. Here’s what you need to know about Tuesday’s launch.
When is the test flight, and how can I watch it?
The launch may occur as early as Tuesday during a 30-minute time slot starting at 5 p.m. Eastern time. SpaceX will stream coverage of the test flight beginning about 30 minutes before liftoff from SpaceX’s site in South Texas near the city of Brownsville.
What is Starship?
The Starship rocket system is the largest ever built — 397 feet tall, or about 90 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty including the pedestal.
And it has the most engines ever in a rocket booster: The Super Heavy booster — the bottom part of the rocket — has 33 of SpaceX’s powerful Raptor engines sticking out of its bottom. As those engines lift Starship off the launchpad in South Texas, they will generate 16 million pounds of thrust at full throttle.
The upper part, also called Starship or Ship for short, looks like a shiny rocket from science fiction movies of the 1950s, made of stainless steel with large fins. This is the upper stage that will head toward orbit, and ultimately could carry people to the moon or even Mars.
How is the sixth flight different from the last launch?
In most ways, the sixth flight will be a repeat of the fifth flight.
One difference is that SpaceX plans to restart one of the engines on the upper-stage Starship during its one-hour flight through space. That is a capability that will be needed to bring a future Starship back to the ground from orbit.
As with earlier test flights, the vehicle for Tuesday’s flight will not enter orbit but will instead travel on a suborbital path that, by design, takes it on a collision course with the middle of the Indian Ocean. That way, if anything goes wrong, the rocket will still splash down harmlessly in the water.
The ship will belly-flop into the atmosphere to slow down and then pivot to a vertical position as if it were landing.
After the Super Heavy finishes its main job of pushing Starship up through the lower, dense part of the atmosphere, it will drop off.
Additional engine firings will turn the Super Heavy back toward the launch site and slow it down as it descends. The flight director will have to give an explicit command for the booster to head back to the launchpad for a catch attempt. If anything looks not quite right, the booster will instead splash down in the Gulf of Mexico.
There are some other tweaks to the rocket and flight plans.
Thermal tiles on the surface of Starship’s underside protect it from the heat of re-entry. On this flight, SpaceX has deliberately left off tiles on entire sections of Starship’s underside. That is to test secondary heat protection materials that aim to prevent heat from burning through the rocket skin if some tiles fall off.
On Tuesday, it will perform a stress test of the ship’s steering flaps by falling at a higher angle during the final part of its descent.
Previous Starship launches occurred early in the morning. This flight will launch in the afternoon so that it will be daylight in the Indian Ocean, allowing better observations of Starship’s landing.
The entire flight should take a little more than one hour.
The test will also seek to correct imperfections in the fifth flight. As the Super Heavy booster came down in that test, flames rose along one side and burned for a while as it hung from the mechanical arms nicknamed chopsticks. They soon burned out.
SpaceX said it upgraded the booster’s propulsion systems, added strength to the structure in certain areas and updated software.
How could the 2024 election result affect Starship and SpaceX?
The pace of Starship flights could pick up, and Mr. Trump has promised to streamline regulatory procedures.
Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder, has complained that the pace of testing of the vehicle has been slowed through unnecessary environmental reviews by the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates private space launches, and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.
The new administration could also speed up Mr. Musk’s dreams of using Starship to send people to Mars.
Currently, NASA is planning to use a version of Starship as a lander that would take astronauts back to the moon. But Mr. Trump could shift NASA’s focus to sending astronauts to the red planet instead.
Mr. Musk has said SpaceX planned to launch uncrewed Starships to Mars in 2026 to test its ability to land there, and if successful, people could be aboard for a future opportunity. Earth and Mars align every 26 months.
Mr. Musk has also suggested that the F.A.A. under Mr. Trump could allow Starship to conduct suborbital flights taking passengers halfway around the world in half an hour.
The post SpaceX Prepares for Sixth Starship Test Launch: What to Know appeared first on New York Times.
