SpaceX pushes back Starship test flight by a day due to weather

After launching more than 100 small payloads from California on Tuesday and two commercial landers on the Moon From Florida early Wednesday, both atop Falcon 9 rockets, SpaceX prepared a massive super-heavy craft for a world-shaking launch from the Texas Gulf Coast to begin the program’s seventh test flight.

But bad weather prompted the California rocket maker to postpone the high-profile flight until Thursday, when it will follow a NASA spacewalk outside the International Space Station and the launch of the New rocket Glenn by Jeff Bezos for his maiden flight.

The New Glenn is scheduled to take off itself, delayed by weather conditions, from platform 36 of the Cape Canaveral space station in Florida at 1 a.m. (Eastern time), the opening of a three-hour launch window.

Six hours later, space station astronauts Nick Hague and Starliner pilot Sunita Williams plan to venture out of NASA’s laboratory complex for a six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk beginning around 8 a.m. to perform various maintenance and upgrade tasks.

This will set the stage for the launch of the Super Heavy-Starship from SpaceX’s manufacturing and flight test facilities in Boca Chica, Texas, at 5 p.m. EST, weather permitting.

The Super Heavy-Starship is the most powerful rocket ever built, generating a staggering 16 million pounds of thrust at liftoff thanks to 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines. The New Glenn rocket, built by Bezos’ Blue Origin space company, isn’t as powerful, but it will compete directly with SpaceX’s industry-dominating Falcon 9 family rockets.

Like the Falcon 9 first stage, the New Glenn booster is reusable, and Blue Origin will attempt to recover its first stage by landing on an offshore landing ship. The rocket’s upper stage will continue into orbit where flight controllers will perform a series of tests. Additional flights are planned for later this year.

The Super Heavy-Starship has a more ambitious agenda, suited to its gargantuan size.

As with the two most recent test flights, the first stage will bring the Starship’s upper stage out of the dense lower atmosphere before falling and returning to the launch site for recovery. The Starship, for its part, will continue to travel in space thanks to the power of its six Raptor engines.

For these first test flights, the Starships are not attempting to reach orbit. Instead, they loop halfway around the planet and descend belly-first through a hellish blaze of atmospheric friction before rising again for a rocket-powered splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

For the third consecutive flight, SpaceX plans to attempt to “catch” the Super Heavy first stage after it propels the craft out of the lower atmosphere, hooking it on the way down using giant mechanical arms called wands mounted on the launch tower. .

THE first take of this type Last October’s event was a success, a spectacular spectacle in front of thousands of enthusiastic residents and tourists. But the Super Heavy used for next flight of this type a month later was diverted to a water landing in the Gulf of Mexico due to launch damage to tower sensors that were needed to help guide the descending booster into position.

The new sensors now have more robust shielding to eliminate such damage and SpaceX engineers are optimistic that they will soon recover Super Heavy boosters with the same regularity they demonstrated with the company’s Falcon 9 rockets.

But the bulk of the upgrades tested Thursday are part of what SpaceX calls a “next generation” spacecraft. Several systems have been modified to improve performance and test systems necessary for possible stage recovery.

“This new year will be a transformation for Starship,” SpaceX said on its website, “with the goal of bringing system-wide reuse online and achieving increasingly ambitious missions as we progress toward the ability to send humans and cargo into orbit of Earth, the Moon and Mars.”