By Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON, July 13 (Reuters) – The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration on Monday closed its review into a SpaceX Starship booster’s return failure that occurred during a flight test in May, clearing the way for Elon Musk’s company to launch the rocket’s next test flight from Texas as soon as Thursday.
The May 22 test flight of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, the 12th test since April 2023, debuted a new version that is expected to be the centerpiece of Musk’s launch business, satellite ambitions and efforts to put astronauts on the moon.
After boosting the Starship upper stage into space on a suborbital path ending up in the Indian Ocean, the Super Heavy booster failed an attempt to return in a controlled soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico, as five of its 33 Raptor engines did not re-ignite to slow its vertical descent.
Super Heavy suffered heat damage when Starship fired its engines to separate from the booster roughly two minutes into the flight and was pushed into an unexpected position.
The FAA said “erroneous engine alarm system settings” also contributed to the return failure, and Super Heavy plunged into the Gulf of Mexico at high speed, exploding on impact.
SpaceX identified four corrective actions regarding the booster return failure, the FAA said.
One of the Starship upper stage’s engines did not work during Flight 12. SpaceX made “several hardware and operational modifications” to address “the interconnected causes,” the company wrote on its website on Saturday, without explaining what those causes were.
The company is gearing up for another Starship test launch from its Starbase, Texas, company town on Thursday in a 90-minute window beginning at 6:45 p.m. ET. Similar to the last flight, SpaceX hopes to return Super Heavy into Gulf of Mexico waters and water-land Starship in the Indian Ocean after a roughly hour-long flight through suborbital space.
The 13th Starship flight will deploy actual Starlink V3 satellites for the first time, following other Starship tests that deployed dummy satellites.
Twenty Starlink satellites dispensed from Starship will unfurl solar arrays and antennae, some of them bearing sensors to scan Starship’s heatshield as it falls back toward Earth’s atmosphere.
The satellites will burn up in the atmosphere as they follow Starship’s return to Earth. New experiments and various materials on Starship’s heatshield will again test the rocket’s ability to withstand punishing atmospheric friction and survive reentry, a requirement for the rocket’s fully reusable design.
SpaceX expects to start launching Starlink V3 satellites aboard Starship rockets by the end of 2026, a long-sought milestone as the program has fallen years behind Musk’s initially projected timelines, with over $15 billion spent on the rocket’s development to date.
The company’s continuous Starlink expansion plans and a long-term goal to put artificial intelligence-processing satellites in space all hinge on Starship.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Paul Simao and Nia Williams)
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