(Bloomberg) -- SpaceX is poised to launch its massive Starship rocket on its fifth major flight on Sunday morning, aiming to “catch” the vehicle’s booster after it returns from space in a key test of the craft’s reusability.
The flight, set for 8 a.m. New York time out of SpaceX’s launch site in south Texas, serves as the next big step for the company as it readies the rocket for operational flight. Critical for SpaceX Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk’s ambitions of sending people to the moon and Mars, Starship still has a long road ahead before it launches crew and cargo.
Recovering Starship’s booster after launch will be a crucial milestone for SpaceX, as Musk has long touted that the vehicle will be fully reusable. The company is known for recovering its workhorse Falcon 9 rockets after launch, but those spacecraft are only partly reusable, with a portion of the vehicles still being destroyed or left unused after the mission is over.
With Starship, SpaceX’s eventual aim is to fully recover the vehicle’s two main parts: the Starship spacecraft itself — which will carry satellites and eventually passengers — and the ship’s massive booster, called Super Heavy, which propels Starship to space. By recovering both of these pieces after flight, SpaceX hopes to rapidly reuse and relaunch the hardware following takeoff, allowing for multiple flights of Starship in a single day. The company also expects full reusability to drastically lower the cost of launching Starship.
Like the Falcon 9, Starship’s Super Heavy booster will come back to Earth, using fins to help guide it through the atmosphere. It will also reignite its engines to help lower itself down to the ground slowly. But unlike the Falcon 9 — which lands on a hard surface with a set of landing legs — Super Heavy is designed to be caught just before it touches the ground. The booster is meant to return to its launch pad, where two giant “arms” attached to the launch tower will protrude outward and stop the vehicle’s fall.
Sunday’s flight will be the first time that SpaceX attempts this feat with Super Heavy. On Starship’s fourth flight in June, the company attempted to “land” Super Heavy in the Gulf of Mexico, aiming for a pinpoint target in the ocean. Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president of build and flight reliability, said Oct. 9 at a meeting that the Super Heavy came within “half a centimeter” accuracy of its target during that splashdown.
Apart from the booster catch, Starship’s flight will look fairly similar to its June flight. SpaceX will attempt to launch the Starship and Super Heavy booster together, getting Starship to near-orbital speeds. Starship is meant to circle most of the globe before plunging through the atmosphere and splashing down in the Indian Ocean.
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During the last flight, Starship survived much of the descent to Earth, but started to break apart during the fall and eventually burned up completely before it could hit the ocean. SpaceX said that it has completely reworked the heat shield on Starship for this flight to help it withstand the intense heating it experiences while falling through the atmosphere.
With each of these Starship test flights, SpaceX doesn’t necessarily deem the loss of its vehicles as failures. The goal for the company is to continue improving with each subsequent test flight. So far, the company has been able to achieve more goals with every new launch.
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