SpaceX set for 1st Starship test launch of the year today

Richard Tribou, Orlando Sentinel on Jan 15, 2025

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ORLANDO — SpaceX is ready to send up its first test flight of the year for its Starship and Super Heavy rocket from Texas on Wednesday, and will once again go for a booster catch back at the launch site.

The seventh test flight overall for the 396-foot-tall combined rocket is aiming for liftoff from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas during a 60-minute launch window that opens at 5 p.m. EST.

The Super Heavy booster powered by 33 Raptor engines produces up to 16.7 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, making it the most powerful rocket in history to reach space, although so far all the test flights have been suborbital with the upper Starship stage only traveling partway around the Earth with target splashdown landings in the Indian Ocean near Australia.

The seventh flight will attempt the same flight path, and SpaceX will try to repeat the spectacle it achieved on its fifth test flight last year nailing a recovery capture of the Super Heavy booster back at the launch tower using what the company calls the tower’s “chopsticks,” which swivel in to grab hold of the booster as it makes a powered, hovering descent.

The sixth test flight last November skipped the attempt because of some sensor damage done to the tower on liftoff, but SpaceX was able to make the most controlled landing yet of its Starship upper stage over the ocean.

This seventh flight features what SpaceX calls a new generation upper stage ship, and the mission calls for its first payload deployment test. Changes in design continue to experiment with its shape, such as moving the location and size of its forward flaps, while also trying out various heat shield solutions.

SpaceX is not yet ready to try a recovery landing of the upper stage, though, so it will aim for a splashdown again a little more than an hour after launch.

On board will be 10 Starlink-size simulators that will be deployed and follow Starship’s trajectory so they also splash down in the ocean. The flight plan also calls once again for a relighting of a single one of the upper stage’s six Raptor engines.

Plans for this year’s spate of test flights do include sticking the upper stage landing as well as perform a propellant transfer in space, something that will be needed when Starship is used for NASA’s Artemis moon missions.

As far as the attempt to recapture the booster, the launch tower has been outfitted with radar sensors aiming to increase accuracy measuring distance between the chopsticks and the booster as it comes in for the catch. One of the 33 engines on this flight flew previously on the fifth test flight, marking the first reuse of a Raptor engine. The tower sensors also feature more protection to avoid the damage seen on the sixth test flight giving SpaceX a better chance at nailing the capture.

If safety parameters aren’t met as the booster makes it way back to the pad, the flight director will order it to veer off for a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico as it did on the sixth test flight.

All test flights to date have taken place from Texas, but SpaceX has two launch sites planned from the Space Coast in Florida. It’s already building out a tower at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39-A adjacent to where it launches Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy missions. It’s also aiming to build out a tower at neighboring Cape Canaveral Space Force Station taking over Space Launch Complex 37, which had been the home for United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy’s final launches.

Environmental impact studies for both sites were started in 2024, but expected to be complete this year.

SpaceX’s plans are to build up infrastructure in Florida and potentially other launch sites to get to hundreds and eventually thousands of Starship launches a year, part of Musk’s goal of creating a colony on Mars.

NASA, though, is awaiting a working version of Starship to act as the human landing system for its Artemis III mission, which is aiming to fly as early as mid-2027, and would mark the first time humans, including the first woman, will have set foot on the moon since the end of the Apollo program in 1972.

NASA requires SpaceX to perform a successful uncrewed flight of Starship landing on the moon ahead of that mission as well.

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