It has been over a 12 months and a half since we have seen a prototype of SpaceX’s next-gen Starship spacecraft fly, and its first flight with a Tremendous Heavy rocket has been perpetually pushed again throughout that point.
Musk, who additionally at present helms Tesla and Twitter, tweeted Saturday that he is hopeful the primary orbital flight of Starship might occur as quickly as subsequent month.
“We’ve an actual shot at late February. March launch try seems extremely doubtless,” he wrote.
SpaceX launched a sequence of Starship high-altitude flights in 2020 and 2021 that noticed a three-engine model of the spacecraft fly to the stratosphere and are available again for a sequence of touchdown makes an attempt that every one led to explosions aside from the ultimate, profitable try on Could 5, 2021.
We’ve an actual shot at late February. March launch try seems extremely doubtless.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 8, 2023
Shortly afterward, SpaceX introduced that it could change gears to start producing extra Raptor engines, testing Tremendous Heavy booster prototypes and getting ready for the primary orbital launch of Starship. The plan is for Starship to blast off from the corporate’s Starbase facility in Texas atop Tremendous Heavy, which is able to return for a touchdown on a platform within the Gulf of Mexico after separation whereas the Starship automobile continues on for a fast journey to orbit adopted by a splashdown touchdown within the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Hawaii.
The flight plan has been stymied by quite a few delays, largely tied to the method of getting a launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration. The corporate’s software first needed to undergo an environmental evaluation course of that lasted a number of months, concluding with the company permitting the mission to go ahead however requiring SpaceX to make dozens of modifications to its launch plan.
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SpaceX Starship is preparing for its first orbital flight
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The company still hasn’t secured its permit to launch from the FAA as it works through the required changes while simultaneously continuing to manufacture and test Raptor engines and get Super Heavy ready for its first launch.
The next Starship flight has been just a month or two away going back to June 2022, when the FAA announced its decision, and this latest update continues that pattern.
SpaceX isn’t the only party with an interest in seeing Starship fly again. NASA has selected it to be one of the vehicles it flies to the moon as part of the Artemis program aiming at returning astronauts to the lunar surface this decade.
