SpaceX is gearing up for its second attempt to hold a large rocket booster using its massive “chopstick” arms, as the company prepares for the sixth Starship test flight.
Starship will launch on Tuesday, November 19, with a 30-minute launch window opening at 5:00 pm ET. A little more than a month after the booster took off, the rocket will take off from SpaceX’s Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, to another spacecraft designed to test the Starship’s reproducibility.
Watch the sixth Starship flight test →
– SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 16, 2024
SpaceX will broadcast the sixth Starship test flight on its website and through the company’s account on X, with the live stream scheduled to begin about 45 minutes before liftoff.
A few days before its scheduled launch, SpaceX moved the Starship’s Super Heavy booster to the launch pad at Starbase to prepare it for stacking on top of the rocket’s stage. The sixth test flight will mark a quick turnaround for the Starship rocket, which launched just over a month ago. Fortunately for SpaceX, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) granted the company a permit for the 5th combined flight test that would also allow its Starship rocket to fly a sixth time under the same license. Previously, SpaceX would have had to wait for the FAA to grant it a new license.
The Starship lifted off for the fifth time on October 13, but for the first time, the Starship’s Super Heavy 232-foot-tall (71 meters) booster gently descended towards a special tower, named Mechazilla, which grasped the rocket with its outstretched arms. like big sticks. On its sixth launch, SpaceX will attempt another Starship booster catch, while the upper stage will pilot one of its Raptor engines into space for the first time and perform re-entry and descent tests.
With each test flight, the Starship gets closer to packing useful payloads and reaching orbital altitude. SpaceX launched its Starship rocket for the first time in April 2023, but the launch was not so good as the vehicle ran into a cliff forcing ground controllers to issue a self-destruct command just before the four-minute mark of the journey.
Things got a little better for the rocket each time it took off. The fourth ascent of the Starship in June broke new grounds compared to its previous test flights, the rocket was much heavier at high temperature and high aerodynamic pressure during controlled re-entry. That paved the way for re-entry and holding the booster in early October, a feat SpaceX hopes to repeat a second time.
Eventually, SpaceX plans to recover and reuse both the Starship’s booster and its upper stage. The company’s founder and CEO Elon Musk recently revealed SpaceX’s intention to hold a spaceship using Mechazilla early next year. SpaceX is also aiming for more Starship launches, with Musk aiming for 25 launches by 2025. Whether the rocket can keep up with the times of the billionaire’s ambitions remains to be seen.
