Mere weeks after Starship’s breakup, the vehicle may soon fly again – Ars Technica

The FAA has not concluded its investigation, but a resolution is expected soon.
A little over a month after SpaceX’s large Starship launch ended in an explosion over several Caribbean islands, the company is preparing its next rocket for a test flight.According to a notice posted by the Federal Aviation Administration, the eighth test flight of the Starship vehicle could take place as early as February 26 from the Starbase launch site in South Texas. The launch window extends from 5:30 pm local time (23:30 UTC) to 7:09 pm (01:09 UTC).Company sources confirmed that this launch date is plausible, but it’s also possible that the launch could slip a day or two to Thursday or Friday of next week.This is an important flight for SpaceX to get the Starship program back on track.During the last mission on January 16, the massive rocket’s first stage performed normally, and a few minutes after launching, it was successfully and spectacularly caught by its launch tower in South Texas. However, a few minutes into the flight of the Starship upper stage, a fire developed in the aft section of the vehicle, leading to the loss of its engines. The vehicle broke apart, and residents and tourists in the Turks and Caicos Islands, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico observed a shower of debris falling through the atmosphere.The impacts of the failure in spaceflight were tangible here on Earth. After the breakup of Starship, FAA air traffic controllers cleared additional airspace over the debris zone for more than an hour, rerouting, diverting, and delaying dozens of commercial aircraft. Later, debris was collected on Turks and Caicos, and the FAA opened an anomaly investigation. The federal agency has the responsibility to protect people and property on the ground.That investigation has not concluded. However, it seems clear that the FAA—in issuing its notice this week—and SpaceX believe that a resolution is coming soon. SpaceX has been making final preparations for stacking the Starship upper stage onto its first stage, which could happen in the next few days.It’s impossible to fully know the politics at play behind the scenes at the busy federal agency. The FAA has been dealing with several high-profile aircraft accidents, and its Trump-appointed acting administrator, Chris Rocheleau, has only been on the job for a couple of weeks. In addition, personnel from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have been making visits to FAA facilities, and a handful of SpaceX engineers recently began advising on improving the agency’s system for controlling air traffic. Although the FAA has a separate department to handle rocket launch licensing, the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, it’s difficult to ignore the optics of a conflict of interest.SpaceX has not publicly outlined a flight plan for the upcoming test flight.However, it almost certainly will be a copy of the plan for January’s flight. During that mission, the company sought to test significant upgrades to Starship, including new forward flaps and larger propellant tanks. The new ship’s propellant tanks have 25 percent more volume than previous iterations of the vehicle, and the payload compartment is somewhat smaller.As part of January’s mission, a little more than 17 minutes into the flight, Starship was intended to deploy 10 dummy payloads similar in size and weight to next-generation Starlink satellites. The mock-ups were meant to soar around the world on a suborbital trajectory, just like Starship, and reenter over the unpopulated Indian Ocean. That did not happen, of course, due to the engine-section fire.Therefore, it’s likely that the upcoming test flight will seek to demonstrate the viability of Starship’s propulsion system and then perform the tasks intended during the seventh test flight. If that goes well, it could clear the way for missions to deploy operational Starlink satellites and work toward demonstrations of in-space propellant transfer.Ars Technica has been separating the signal from
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Source: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/02/starships-eighth-test-flight-may-take-place-next-week/