The largest and heaviest space rocket ever built just got a little bit more so. Next Monday the seventh test flight of Starshipwith important news. It will be the first flight of Starship v2which, among the changes it presents in relation to the v1 (protagonist of the first six flights), is found an increase in height. The assembly formed by the propeller Super Heavy and the Starship spacecraft it gains 1.8 meters and now reaches 123.1 meters in height.
Super Heavy is located on the launch pad starbasein Texas, starting this Thursday, in preparation for takeoff, and In the next few hours SpaceX will place Starship about the propeller. Launch window opens on Monday at 11:00 p.m. in Spain; In Texas it will then be the early afternoon, in broad daylight.
‘The next flight test will launch a new generation of ship with significant improvements‘, will attempt Starship’s first cargo deployment test, fly multiple reentry experiments focused on ship capture and reuse, and launch and recover the Super Heavy booster,’ SpaceX explains in a mission description posted on the website. of the company.
Starship to launch tower this morning pic.twitter.com/RnZVWpRZOm
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 9, 2025
On its seventh flight, Starship will repeat many of the maneuvers it already performed on the previous two. Among them, SpaceX will try to land Super Heavy on the launch tower again and trap it with the mechanical arms of the system nicknamed Mechazillaapproximately 7 minutes after takeoff. The company achieved this feat — Super Heavy is as tall as a building about 28 stories high — on the fifth flight, but canceled the maneuver on the sixth due to damage to the tower’s arm sensors and loss of communication between it and mission control. The booster, which remained in good condition, was diverted for a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
The launch tower
SpaceX added protections to the tower sensors and will test radar instruments on mechanical arms to provide more accurate distance measurements to returning vehicles. These modifications should improve the odds of a successful catch of the Super Heavy booster and Starship on future missions.
Another novelty is the reuse of one of the 33 Raptor engines that Super Heavy used on the fifth flight last October. This represents a step forward towards the goal of a completely reusable rocket that can fly numerous times.
The second stage, Starship
The most significant changes that SpaceX will test involve the rocket’s second stage, the Starship capsule. The most obvious is that the company’s engineers have redesigned the front wings of the vehiclereducing their size and bringing them closer to the tip of the nose to better protect them from the intense heat of reentry.
On this flight, the Super Heavy and Starship set will contain some 4,760 tons of fuel and oxidizer. The ship’s propulsion tanks have 25% more volume than earlier versions of the vehicle and the payload compartment—which will carry 10 Starlink satellite models (once launched, they will follow a suborbital trajectory until re-entering the Indian Ocean) — is somewhat smaller. These changes are what have made Starship, the second stage, gain in height and volume.
Other improvements that have been introduced to the rocket include vacuum insulation in the propellant feed lines, a new fuel feed line system for the Raptor engines, an improved propulsion avionics module, inertial navigation and tracking sensors. redesigned star systems, smart batteries and integrated power units to distribute 2.7 megawatts of power throughout the ship, and the number of onboard cameras has been increased to 30. With Starlink, SpaceX claims that Starship can transmit more than 120 Mbps of high-definition video and real-time telemetry during all phases of flight.
These changes ‘add greater performance to the vehicle and the ability to fly longer missions,’ SpaceX states. ‘The ship’s heat shield will also use the latest generation of tiles and includes a backing layer to protect in case of missing or damaged tiles’.
The heat shield, Starship’s biggest challenge
The heat shield is, in the words of Elon Musk, ‘the biggest technological challenge pending with Starship’. For SpaceX to meet its goal of launching Starship rockets multiple times a day, it must be completely reusable and immediately reusable.
Starship’s sixth flight test aimed to push the vehicle to its limits as we iterate towards a rapidly reusable rocket.
Up next: a new ship, new year, and new limits. Excitement still guaranteed → https://t.co/QNCSPTewLApic.twitter.com/JjhBq8RyYp
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) January 3, 2025
Especially in the fourth flight, and to a lesser extent in the following ones, it was possible to see how some tiles came off during reentry, in which they must withstand temperatures of up to 1,430 °C. For this flight, the engineers They have removed tiles in some areas of the ship in order to ‘test’ vulnerable parts.
They will also be tested multiple metal tile optionsincluding one with active cooling, to evaluate alternative protection materials during reentry,’ says SpaceX. Additionally, the ship will fly in a more demanding trajectory during the descent to analyze the structural limits of the redesigned fins at the point of maximum dynamic inlet pressure.
And when will SpaceX try to land on land not only Super Heavy, but also Starship? ‘We will make one more landing in the ocean with the ship. If that goes well, then SpaceX will try to capture the ship with the tower‘, Elon Musk has published on the social network X.
Also in the future is the launch of Starship v3which will be even larger than v2, will add three more Raptor engines to the space capsule — bringing the total to nine — and will be able to transport 200 tons to low-Earth orbit.