SpaceX will attempt to launch the world’s largest and most powerful rocket, Starship, orbit the Earth and then land both the booster and upper stage safely back at the launch site for reuse. This test flight is the most ambitious to date and could show that the company’s ambitions to build reusable spacecraft are bearing fruit.
Starship has two parts: an upper stage, confusingly also called Starship, and a lower stage, called Super Heavy. SpaceX hopes to make both parts of the craft reusable to lower costs and enable greater numbers of launches. Until now, it has never staged a test flight on which both parts were recovered in reusable condition – at least one section always landed in the sea.
Starship’s 15th test flight could take place as soon as 13 November and aims to place the upper stage into an orbit around 275 kilometres above Earth before making 14 loops around the planet, with a flight time of around 22 hours.
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Immediately after launch, the Super Heavy booster is meant to return to the launch pad for a safe landing – something demonstrated only three times before. And, for the first time ever, the plan is for the upper stage Starship to also return to Starbase, Texas, to land on a second pad. If both sections land and can be reused, the mission will mark a significant advance for SpaceX.
at Imperial College London says there is a good chance of success, and that the mission could show that SpaceX is edging towards its goals.
“This would be a significant incremental milestone for SpaceX. Landing and catching the upper stage would allow SpaceX to show that they have achieved the objective of making Starship not only survive through the heat and stresses of re-entry, but also guided it successfully to a soft landing,” says Amato. “Terminal guidance to soft landing is critical also because Starship will have to fly over land – the guidance system must work to avoid any risk from ground impact.”
SpaceX didn’t respond to a request for interview, but that Starship would “weave” its way around cities in northern Mexico and southern Texas to avoid overflying populous areas on its way to landing at Starbase. During this approach, residents may hear sonic booms, the company said.
At this point, SpaceX is several years into its development programme for Starship, intended to be a rapidly reusable and extremely powerful launch vehicle that will take over the rollout of the company’s Starlink satellites and be a central part of NASA’s Artemis moon missions.
Starship’s 14th flight launched in September and was intended to complete six full orbits of Earth, but was cut short following engine problems. It successfully reached an orbital trajectory, but didn’t complete a full orbit, meaning that flight 15 will be – if successful – the first fully orbital flight for a Starship.
Flight 15 also aims to replicate the successful deployment of 26 Starlink V3 satellites seen on the 14th flight. Thousands of these new craft will join the existing constellation of satellites that provides internet connections around the world.
“It’s difficult to say how much the cost of launch will decrease due to Starship in the future. This will depend on SpaceX showing that they can land, perform maintenance and reuse the full launch vehicle very fast. This is precisely where the space shuttle failed – technologically it was a great step forward, but the economic case did not close because of its slow launch cadence,” says Amato. “It’s likely that Starship will be economically very competitive, but whether this will result in a revolutionary step change in launch cost remains to be seen.”
