SpaceX’s Starship megarocket will fly again next week, if all goes according to plan.
Elon Musk announced that timeline target in a Tuesday evening (May 13) X post, which also included another nugget of news that space fans will find interesting.
“Just before the Starship flight next week, I will give a company talk explaining the Mars game plan in Starbase, Texas, that will also be live-streamed on X,” Musk wrote in the post.
Starship and Mars are closely intertwined. SpaceX is developing the fully reusable vehicle — the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built — to help humanity settle the Red Planet, a long-held dream of Musk’s.
SpaceX has not announced a precise date for the upcoming test flight, which will be the ninth for a fully stacked Starship vehicle. However, notices to pilots and mariners suggest that May 21 is the working target, pending approval from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
The FAA is overseeing SpaceX’s investigation into what happened on Flight 8, which launched on March 6. Starship’s Super Heavy first stage performed well on that mission, but the vehicle’s upper stage — known as Starship, or simply Ship — exploded less than 10 minutes after liftoff. Flight 7, which lifted off in January, had the same basic outcome.
The FAA must approve SpaceX’s mishap report, and any corrective actions the company has taken, before Flight 9 can proceed. This hasn’t happened yet, as far as we know, but Musk appears confident that those boxes will be ticked by next week.
SpaceX has been prepping the Flight 9 Starship vehicle for some time now; it has already performed “static fire” engine tests with the Super Heavy and Ship that will conduct the test flight.
That Super Heavy is special, by the way: It’s the same vehicle that flew on Flight 7. (The booster came back to Starbase that day and was caught by the launch tower’s “chopstick” arms, as also happened on Flight 8.) Flight 9 will mark the first reuse of a Starship stage.