SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket is ready for its second-ever test flight.
SpaceX stacked its latest Starship on Tuesday (September 5), lifting the upper stage prototype of Ship 25 to the Booster 9 “Super Heavy” first stage at the company’s Starbase site in South Texas.
The work marks a major milestone ahead of the impending test flight, which SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk says could happen when the required regulatory boxes are checked.
“The spacecraft is ready for launch, pending Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approval,” Musk wrote Tuesday in a letter. Post on X (formerly Twitter) which includes a 40-second video that captures highlights from the stacking process.
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Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, is still in development. SpaceX envisions that the fully reusable vehicle will eventually handle nearly all of its spaceflight duties, from launching satellites into Earth orbit to sending people to the Moon and Mars.
A fully stacked spacecraft has flown only once so far, in April this year, on a Starbase test flight intended to send the upper stage partially around Earth, with a planned landing in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.
However, that vehicle suffered several problems shortly after its launch, including the failure of the first and second stages to separate. As a result, SpaceX issued a self-destruct command, exploding the vehicle high above the Gulf of Mexico four minutes after liftoff.
SpaceX has made a number of changes to this second Starship. Perhaps most notable is the shift to a “hot staging” strategy, in which the upper stage ignites its engines before separating completely from the first stage booster. This switch requires modifications to be made to Booster 9, including the installation of a heat shield and a “ventilated interstage” to protect it from ship 25 fire.
SpaceX has been preparing for the second flight for some time, whose goals will be similar to those of the first flight. For example, the company performed two “static ignitions” with Booster 9, briefly igniting the vehicle’s Raptor engines while it remained docked to Starbase’s orbital launch pad.
These two tests took place on August 6 and August 25. The second test was a marked improvement. All 33 of the Booster 9 Raptors lit up, compared to 29 during the first steady fire, according to SpaceX.
But there’s more than just technical advances to the spacecraft’s flight readiness, Musk noted in his social media post: The FAA still hasn’t granted a launch authorization for this second liftoff.
The agency is still reviewing SpaceX’s unfortunate report on the April 20 flight, which damaged Starbase’s orbital launch pad and sent dirt, bits of concrete and other debris into the area around the site.
