A month after its latest launch, SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket is preparing to take flight again.
Starship began its second-ever test mission on November 18, but it ended in two spectacular explosions. But as always, the company is preparing for its next endeavor.
SpaceX wrote today (Dec. 18) that it would “fly Flight 3 vehicles over the Starbase pad for testing in advance of Starship’s next launch.” Post to X (formerly known as Twitter) shared three photos of the spacecraft involved. (Starbase is SpaceX’s South Texas hub and serves as the manufacturing, testing, and launch center for Starship.)
Related: SpaceX’s second Starship launch looks amazing in stunning photos and video
Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, consists of two reusable stages. a first-stage booster known as the Super Heavy and a 165-foot (50-meter) tall spacecraft called Starship. SpaceX is developing the vehicle to take humans to the moon and Mars, as well as perform a variety of other spaceflight tasks.
Starship has flown twice this year, on April 20th and November 18th. Both test missions were launched from starbases and had the same end goal. The goal is to send the upper stage spacecraft almost around the Earth to a splashdown zone in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.
The debut flight lasted just four minutes. Starship suffered a number of problems, including some Raptor engines failing prematurely and the two stages not being able to separate, and SpaceX forced a controlled explosion over Texas to destroy the spacecraft. Destroyed.
The mission on November 18th was even more successful. The super-heavy 33 Raptor had a successful first burn and the booster successfully separated from the starship’s upper stage. However, Super Heavy exploded while returning to Earth for a scheduled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, and Starship also exploded approximately eight minutes after liftoff.
As current testing shows, SpaceX likes to move fast. In fact, company founder and CEO Elon Musk said shortly after the November 18 launch that Starship 3 should be ready to fly by the end of the year.
But technical preparation is not the only thing that is important here. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is currently overseeing an investigation into what happened on the November 18 flight, which the agency deemed an accident.
Although the FAA has granted launch licenses, SpaceX will not receive future launch licenses for Starship 3 until the investigation is complete and the company takes any corrective actions, if any, required by the FAA. Become.