WASHINGTON — SpaceX hopes to conduct the next launch of its Starship vehicle as soon as early May, a schedule that will depend on how quickly it can get an amended launch license.
Speaking at the Satellite 2024 conference March 19, Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, said the company was still reviewing the data from the vehicle’s third integrated launch March 14 but expected to be ready to fly again soon.
“We’re still going through the data” from the flight, she said when asked about the analysis of data from the mission. “It was an incredibly successful flight. We hit exactly where we wanted to go.”
On that launch both the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage performed as expected on its ascent, placing the vehicle on its planned suborbital trajectory. Starship’s payload door was opened while in space and a propellent transfer demonstration, moving liquid oxygen between two tanks in the vehicle, was initiated.
However, a planned relight of Starship’s Raptor engines while in space did not take place, which the company blamed on a roll induced in the vehicle. During reentry, the vehicle broke apart at about 65 kilometers altitude. The Super Heavy booster also exploded during the final stages of its descent to the Gulf of Mexico during a planned landing burn.
“We’ll figure out what happened on both stages,” she said, not discussing what may have gone wrong with either, “and get back to flight hopefully in about six weeks,” or early May.
She added that the company doesn’t expect to deploy Starlink satellites on the next Starship launch, as some had speculated. “Things are still in trade, but I think we’re really going to focus on getting reentry right and making sure we can land these things where we want to land them.”
That schedule will depend on completing a mishap investigation that must be approved by the Federal Aviation Administration, which would then…
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