SpaceX targets improved booster recovery after Flight 12 mishap
SpaceX has a 90-minute launch window that will open at 5:45 p.m. CDT on Thursday at its Starbase facility near Boca Chica Beach, Texas, for what the company said is the 13th flight of its Starship launch system. The vehicle is the third version of the most powerful rocket ever built, and the first version capable of deep-space flight.
The company has said it is focusing on refining the performance of the Super Heavy booster during this flight. During the 12th test flight on May 22, the booster encountered multiple problems. According to SpaceX, slight differences in engine startup timing during the separation stage caused the booster’s directional flip to be off by approximately 90 degrees. The booster was meant to perform a sustained burn for a controlled landing in the Gulf of Mexico, but the engine failure resulted in what SpaceX described as a “hard splashdown.”
The Federal Aviation Administration said there were no reports of public injury or damage to public property from the May 22 mishap.
SpaceX said in a blog post that after Flight 12, the startup sequence has been modified “to be more robust to timing variability and more reliably flip in the desired direction, which is done to increase overall performance.” The company also reported that during the boostback burn attempt on Flight 12, five of the Super Heavy booster’s 33 engines malfunctioned when trying to re-light, causing the burn to end early. SpaceX said the upcoming flight includes hardware modifications “to improve re-light reliability along with updates to engine alarms and aborts to match the conditions seen in the multi-engine flight environment.”
Flight 12 was the first launch of the rocket’s Version 3 configuration. That variant is the first one SpaceX has described as capable of deep-space flight, and the company plans for Starship to carry NASA’s Artemis 4 astronauts to the lunar surface in a mission set for late 2028.
A new element on Flight 13 is the payload: for the first time, Starship is carrying V3 Starlink satellites into space. SpaceX said the mission will deploy 20 satellites, which will extend their solar arrays and antennas in an attempt to connect with the larger Starlink constellation via high-capacity lasers. The satellites will remain on the same suborbital trajectory as Starship and are designed to burn up on reentry approximately 20 minutes after deployment. The company aims to “greatly expand” its communications network’s capacity and user speeds, according to its blog post.