Elon Musk‘s rocket manufacturing company SpaceX on Monday detailed its lessons from the second flight of Starship and the efforts at fixing issues that led to its failure.
What Happened: The lessons learned during Starship’s second flight test have informed the upgrades made for the upcoming flight, SpaceX said in a statement.
The Starship’s second liftoff on Nov. 18 saw successful stage separation, but the booster experienced an explosion shortly afterward.
The spacecraft broke up after reaching an altitude of nearly 150 kilometers, making it to space but failing to complete the test launch’s goal of a round-trip flight to space with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.
Since then, the company has implemented hardware changes on future Starship vehicles to reduce leaks and protect against fire while also devising ways to increase reliability. The company is also implementing some performance upgrades ahead of flight 3 including the introduction of a new electronic Thrust Vector Control system for Starship's upper-stage Raptor engines and improving the speed of propellant loading operations before launch.
The upgrades made to the launchpad at Starbase after the first test flight destroyed it performed as expected in November and required minimal work post-launch, the company said.
SpaceX touts the Starship as the world’s most powerful launch vehicle ever developed, capable of carrying both crew and cargo to Earth orbit, Moon, and Mars.
Why It Matters: “More Starships are ready to fly, putting flight hardware in a flight environment to learn as quickly as possible,” the company said on Monday.
Earlier this month, Ars Technica reported that SpaceX is looking for a waiver to launch Starship “at least” nine times this year, citing the administrator for Commercial Space Transportation at the Federal Aviation Administration Kelvin Coleman.
“They’re looking at, I believe, at least nine launches this year. That’s a lot of launches. If you’re doing modifications and doing them one by one, that’s a lot of work. We’ve been talking to SpaceX constantly around the clock, coming together and trying to figure out how do we do this. We’re invested with the company, and so we’ll work with them to get them back going as soon as they can,” Coleman reportedly said.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk justified the targetted number of launches saying, “Building a city on Mars will take many launches.”
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