Musk to Address SpaceX Workers After Key Starship Launch

SpaceX delayed an all-hands-style X livestream with Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk until after the planned launch of the company’s colossal Starship rocket on Tuesday evening, without giving a reason.

The talk with the world’s richest person is now scheduled for 8 p.m. local time out of SpaceX’s newly incorporated city, Starbase, in South Texas. The company still plans to launch the ninth scheduled test flight of its Starship rocket at the nearby launch site sometime during a window that opens at 6:30 p.m. local time.

The stakes are particularly high after flights in January and March were cut short just minutes after takeoff when the spacecraft exploded over the Gulf of Mexico, sending streams of debris raining down from the sky.

Starship is critical to Musk and SpaceX’s Mars vision, as the rocket is meant to serve as the primary spacecraft for transporting people to the Red Planet and then bringing them back to Earth. Musk has recently declared that SpaceX will send a Starship rocket to Mars as early as 2026 with robots on board, an incredibly ambitious timeline. 

SpaceX also holds contracts with NASA worth roughly $4 billion to land the agency’s astronauts on the moon with Starship.

A third botched test flight would call into question SpaceX’s progress on Starship and cast further doubt on Musk’s repeated claim that the vehicle will be ready for cargo flights to Mars as soon as next year. It also highlights the risks involved with SpaceX’s chosen development plan for Starship, the largest and most powerful launch system ever developed, and how far the company still has to go to ready the vehicle for operational flight.

This will be Musk’s first public talk in roughly a year about Starship and his vision for Mars settlement. During these events he usually provides updates about changes to the rocket’s design and development.

SpaceX blamed the botched January test on unexpectedly intense vibrations that worsened a propellant leak, leading to fires throughout the vehicle. As for the March failure, the company said that one of Starship’s Raptor engines likely had a hardware issue, causing propellants to mix together at the wrong time and ultimately leading to the explosion.

SpaceX said it led investigations into each of the incidents and made fixes to prevent the problems from happening again. The company also said that the two failures were “distinctly different” from one another, despite the explosions occurring around the same time in each flight. Additionally, future Starship vehicles will be equipped with new “Raptor 3” engines that are supposed to be more reliable.

For this flight, the Federal Aviation Administration said it will expand the size of hazard areas for pilots and mariners to avoid, partly because of the recent launch failures. During the last two flights, numerous commercial airplanes had to divert from their flight paths over the Gulf of Mexico to avoid falling debris.

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Despite the back-to-back launch failures, SpaceX was still able to “catch” Starship’s massive Super Heavy booster back at the rocket’s launch tower following each flight — an impressive feat the company managed to do for the first time last year. 

For this ninth launch, SpaceX intends to re-fly one of the Super Heavy boosters it caught previously — a first for the company — though it won’t be attempting a midair capture of the vehicle on this mission.

Also, when Starship is in space, the company will try again to deploy eight dummy satellites, designed to mimic the size and weight of future Starlink internet satellites that that rocket is meant to deploy when it’s operational. SpaceX had hoped to demonstrate this deployment on the previous two flights before they were cut short.

SpaceX also intends to test a number of technology upgrades aimed at improving Starship’s reusability. Eventually, SpaceX plans to recover both the Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster after each launch. The company will probably achieve this milestone for the first time this year, Musk said during an interview with Bloomberg at the Qatar Economic Forum last week.

Even if this upcoming Starship test launch goes smoothly, SpaceX still has a long way to go before Starship is fully operational. In order to travel through deep space, SpaceX will need to demonstrate the ability to refuel Starship multiple times while in orbit.

However, SpaceX will have the ability to launch more frequently from South Texas moving forward. The FAA recently approved the company’s request to increase the amount of Starship launches SpaceX can conduct each year out of Starbase from five to 25.

With assistance from Sana Pashankar.

This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.