A crucial test this week could bring SpaceX one step closer to revolutionizing spaceflight — or cast new uncertainty on the company’s boldest ambitions. SpaceX will for the first time attempt to bring every part of its massive Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, back to dry land — intact — during a mission set to launch on Friday between 5:45 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. ET. The aim is to develop a fully reusable launch system, a goal the company has deemed the “holy grail” of rocketry because it would eliminate the need to throw away multimillion-dollar rocket parts after a single mission. That in turn could dramatically lower the cost of a single launch — by orders of magnitude, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk hopes — and open a new world of possibilities for space exploration. But to realize its vision, SpaceX needs to figure out how to bring Starship’s upper half, a 171-foot-tall spacecraft, back from orbit to a safe, upright landing within the arms of the company’s South Texas launch tower. Such a move has never been demonstrated. But SpaceX has long made clear that recapturing and reflying the entire Starship vehicle is imperative to achieve some of the company’s most audacious goals and, as the company said in a statement, “unlock the true capability of Starship.” The company intends for the gargantuan rocket to tackle a wide range of lofty, extraterrestrial projects — such as helping NASA to establish a permanent human presence on the moon, expand its space-based Starlink internet network, launch an orbital data center, and “extend the light of consciousness to the stars, and make life multiplanetary,” the company said in a statement, nodding to Musk’s longtime goal of using Starship to colonize Mars. If all goes according to plan during Friday’s test, SpaceX will put on an extraordinary show beginning just minutes after liftoff. That’s when the bottom half of the Starship, called the Super Heavy rocket booster, is expected to break away from the upper spacecraft — or “ship.” The booster would then aim to make its own pinpoint landing back at the launch tower. SpaceX has previously demonstrated this maneuver on a few Starship prior test flights, but never with the current version of the vehicle, called V3, which debuted in May. The company has already pioneered the science of reusing first-stage rocket boosters with its Falcon rockets, saving the company untold millions of dollars. But attempting to recapture and refly the upper stage of a rocket — as SpaceX will attempt to do in this upcoming test of the upper Starship spacecraft — introduces a host of new risks and challenges, as well as potential rewards. A nail-biting test flight After separating from the Super Heavy booster, the ship will ignite its own engines and attempt to reach Earth orbit — a step that SpaceX only narrowly achieved for the first time in September during its last test flight. It requires the spacecraft to relight its engines and reach velocities topping 17,000 miles per hour, or 20 times the speed of sound. This step alone has numerous risks. Any time SpaceX sends a Starship spacecraft to orbit, mission teams must take extreme care to ensure the vehicle can also make a controlled return to Earth. Otherwise, the ship could make an unpredictable descent back home, threatening people or property. “Starship is obviously meant to be a reusable launch vehicle and is meant to survive atmospheric reentry,” said Jeremy Pedro, SpaceX’s director of Starship propulsion systems, in a video recently released by SpaceX. “And so it’s really important that we do not leave the vehicle on orbit in the event that it randomly reenters and comes back over landmasses or populated areas.” If the Starship spacecraft reaches orbit and the flight moves forward, it would complete about 14 laps around the planet over the course of 22 hours. During that time, the vehicle would deploy 26 of SpaceX’s Starlink V3 satellites, which are designed to boost the capacity of the company’s internet service network. As Starship cruises through orbit, mission controllers will also have several opportunities to bring Starship back to Earth early if something is amiss, sending it to a splashdown in the ocean. If all goes according to plan, SpaceX would face the nail-biting theatrics of guiding the ship back into the thick inner band of Earth’s atmosphere — a process called reentry — on Saturday afternoon. This stage of the flight creates a violent wave of compression and a buildup of plasma that can drive temperatures outside the spacecraft to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Then, as the vehicle heads for a landing, Starship will have “to come in across the West Coast of the United States, so you’re crossing land, where typically, on most of these missions you’re crossing bodies of water,” said Joseph Gonzalez, an associate professor of practice in aerospace engineering at the University of Illinois. Passing over inhabited areas makes this a particularly high-stakes moment. SpaceX said on its website that Starship will use four flaps to make “small turns” to intentionally veer over “sparsely populated” areas in its projected path over northern Mexico and southern Texas, reducing the risk of catastrophe if something goes wrong. Even after re-entry, mission controllers can still opt to forgo a landing attempt back at SpaceX’s Starbase facility. Mission controllers will have the option to direct the vehicle to splash down in the Gulf or order the vehicle to self-destruct so that the entire Statue-of-Liberty-size craft doesn’t crash onto land. But if the mission goes smoothly, in the final moments before the historic touchdown attempt, Starship will pass over the northern part of South Padre Island located off the southern coast of Texas, before turning back toward SpaceX’s Mechazilla launch tower and completing an acrobatic bellyflop maneuver. During its final, parachute-less descent, the ship will use its engines and precision steering to try to guide itself back into the arms of the launch tower. “The significance behind this, I don’t think people understand,” Gonzalez said. “If this weekend sees very positive results, I’m thinking they can get to a fully reusable rocket in the next two or three years.” But errors, known in rocketry parlance as “anomalies,” are a very real possibility. Reliability and ‘anomalies’ SpaceX has had a series of issues during recent Starship flights with the reliability of the Raptor rocket engines that power Super Heavy and the ship. Some engines have spontaneously ceased firing or failed to relight when they were supposed to. Those issues were particularly glaring during the last test in September. Called Flight 14, that mission marked the first time SpaceX sought to fly Starship on an orbital trajectory rather than a “passively safe” suborbital one, during which the ship would be more likely to crash into the ocean if it spun out of control. SpaceX had clarified that it needed to ensure the vehicle was working as intended before giving the ship the green light to head for orbit. But minutes into flight, one of the ship’s engines shut down prematurely and remained out of service for the rest of the flight. Initially, mission controllers — and even the host narrating SpaceX’s livestream — said the company would forgo a second engine burn, opting to avoid the risk of sending the vehicle to orbit. But Musk prompted flight controllers to reconsider, according to the video released by SpaceX on Nov. 6. “The moment we lost the engine, we all kind of knew this was the end of the mission for the ship. We had thought, ‘Hey, let’s not proceed if anything goes wrong,’” SpaceX’s Pedro said in a company-released video. “And Elon really questioned the requirements and asked us, ‘Is there anything actually prohibiting us from going forward?’” Ultimately, mission controllers directed the ship to continue to orbit. SpaceX’s decisions were “within approved flight criteria,” according to a Nov. 10 email statement to CNN from the Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses commercial rocket launches. “FAA monitored all activities associated with the conduct of the licensed launch and reentry,” the agency said. Flight 14 ended a few hours earlier than originally planned, but ultimately concluded without any major missteps. The ship made a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean, though the touchdown was not quite as clean or soft as the company had previously been able to achieve. SpaceX has long said that it builds redundancy into its launch vehicles, meaning that they’re designed to continue operating safely even if a few engines fail. But attempting to guide the spaceship over populated areas and to precision landing in such a scenario is a different thing entirely. Why a ship return is monumental — and risky SpaceX has already staked a name for itself as the driving force in a larger race to recapture and refly first-stage boosters. The company’s first success, landing a Falcon first-stage booster in 2015, spurred SpaceX’s rise as the dominant force in the global launch market. Only two other companies — Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and China-based company LandSpace — have ever landed first-stage boosters. They’ve only accomplished the feat for the first time within the past year, more than a decade after SpaceX’s initial success. Still, recovering a first-stage rocket booster is somewhat simpler than attempting to recover the upper stage of a rocket. The Super Heavy booster reaches speeds of about 6,000 kilometres per hour (3,728 miles per hour) before it heads back in for landing. The Starship spacecraft, on the other hand, will be travelling at orbital velocities, which can top 27,000 kilometres per hour (17,000 miles per hour). Vehicles designed to go to space and safely return home are typically small capsules such as SpaceX’s Dragon vehicles or the command modules from the Apollo missions. They ride to orbit atop a rocket. But the upper portion of Starship is a rocket in its own right. “In the space world, you either have rockets or you have spacecraft,” said Lars Blackmore, SpaceX’s senior principal Mars landing engineer, in the company’s promotional video. “We’re trying to make something that’s a rocket — but that can act like a spacecraft.” The Starship spacecraft is so massive that more than 100 Apollo command modules could fit inside its completely hollowed-out interior. In this context, Starship is more similar to NASA’s Space Shuttle orbiters. But the shuttles were strapped to separate, partially reusable rockets for launch. And, notably, the shuttle never became rapidly or easily reusable, as the space agency had once hoped. Each shuttle launch cost about US$1.5 billion on average — hundreds of millions of dollars more than what NASA had planned for at the program’s outset — and required weeks of refurbishment between flights. Starship aims to succeed where the shuttles lacked. One key difference is the landing techniques. NASA’s space shuttles opted for runway landings, reminiscent of an airplane, Gonzalez noted. The maneuver required the shuttle orbiters to be outfitted with landing gear, which was exposed to extreme temperatures as the spacecraft came barreling back into the atmosphere. “If something doesn’t work out well, you could potentially have hot gasses going into your environment where you have your landing gear,” he said. “There’s a lot more risk behind it.” Landing gear also packs more weight onto a vehicle, Gonzalez added. And in the world of rocketry — lighter is always better. “But great things come from a beginning,” Gonzalez said, “and that beginning was the space shuttle.” Landing Starship is still risky business. A Federal Aviation Administration rule requires that SpaceX demonstrate in its applications for Flight 15 approval that there would be a less than 1 in a million chance of a casualty. Notably, however, the company also had to prove it would meet that same standard before a launch in 2025 when Starship exploded over the Turks and Caicos Islands during a test flight. Debris struck a car, but no injuries were reported. The company said it’s confident it can bring Starship home on this flight without issue. “With consistent improvements from flight to flight,” the company said in a November 7 statement, “the SpaceX team has demonstrated that Starship can safely and reliably reenter from space.”
