After launching more than 100 small payloads from California on Tuesday and two commercial moon landers from Florida early Wednesday, both atop Falcon 9 rockets, SpaceX readied a huge Super Heavy-Starship for a ground-shaking launch from the Texas Gulf Coast to kick off the program’s seventh test flight.
But bad weather prompted the California rocket builder to delay the high-profile flight to Thursday, when it will follow a NASA spacewalk outside the International Space Station and the launch of Jeff Bezos’ New Glenn rocket on its maiden flight.
SpaceX
The New Glenn is scheduled for its own weather-delayed liftoff from pad 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 1 a.m. EST, the opening of a three-hour launch window.
Six hours later, space station astronauts Nick Hague and Starliner pilot Sunita Williams plan to venture outside the NASA lab complex for a six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk starting around 8 a.m. to carry out a variety of maintenance and upgrade tasks.
That will set the stage for the Super Heavy-Starship launch from SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas, manufacturing and flight test facility at 5 p.m. EST, weather permitting.
The Super Heavy-Starship is the most powerful rocket ever built, generating a staggering 16 million pounds of thrust at liftoff using 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines. The New Glenn rocket, built by Bezos’ space company Blue Origin, is not nearly as powerful, but it will compete head-to-head with SpaceX’s industry-dominating Falcon 9-family rockets.
Like the Falcon 9’s first stage, the New Glenn booster is reusable, and Blue Origin will attempt to recover its first stage with touchdown on an offshore landing ship. The rocket’s upper stage will continue into orbit where flight controllers will carry out a series of tests. Additional flights are planned later this year.
The Super Heavy-Starship has a more ambitious agenda befitting its gargantuan size.
As with the two most recent test flights, the first stage will boost the Starship upper stage out of the dense lower atmosphere before falling away and heading back to the launch site for recovery. The Starship, meanwhile, will continue to space on the power of six Raptor engines of its own.
Blue Origin
For these initial test flights, the Starships do not attempt to reach orbit. Instead, they loop halfway around the planet and descend belly first through a hellish blaze of atmospheric friction before flipping nose up for a tail-first, rocket-powered splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
For the third flight in a row, SpaceX planned an attempt to “catch” the Super Heavy first stage after it propelled the Starship out of the lower atmosphere, snagging it on the way down using giant mechanical arms known as chopsticks mounted on the launch tower.
The first such catch last October was successful, a spectacular sight to thousands of cheering residents and tourists. But the Super Heavy used for the next such flight a month later was diverted to a Gulf of Mexico splashdown because of launch damage to sensors on the tower that were needed to help guide the descending booster into position.
New sensors now have more robust shielding to eliminate such damage and SpaceX engineers are optimistic they’ll soon be recovering Super Heavy boosters with the same regularity they’ve demonstrated with the company’s workhorse Falcon 9 rockets.
But the bulk of the upgrades being tested Thursday are built into what SpaceX calls a “new generation” Starship. Multiple systems have been modified to improve performance and to test systems needed for eventual stage recovery.
“This new year will be transformational for Starship,” SpaceX said on its website, “with the goal of bringing reuse of the entire system online and flying increasingly ambitious missions as we iterate towards being able to send humans and cargo to Earth orbit, the moon, and Mars.”
