SpaceX has been cleared to fly Starship again after a booster failure in May

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has allowed SpaceX to launch Starship prototypes again, after the company determined the likely cause of a failure of the rocket system’s booster stage during a flight in May.

SpaceX said over the weekend that the Starship’s next flight could take place on Thursday, July 16. This will be the second launch ever of the third version, or V3, of Starship. SpaceX also said that this spacecraft will carry the first third-generation Starlink satellites into space. Previously, the spacecraft carried only dummy versions of larger, more powerful Internet satellites.

This is SpaceX’s second test flight of its Starship system, and its first as a public company, testing the market’s appetite for the company’s “fly, fail, fix” approach to rocket development that often ends in fireballs — or as CEO Elon Musk calls explosions: “rapid, unscheduled disassembly.” SpaceX completed its initial public offering and listed publicly on the Nasdaq on June 12, making it so… One of the ten most valuable companies in the world It raised nearly $86 billion, a record.

SpaceX’s first test launch of the V3 Starship on May 22 was largely successful. The company’s Super Heavy booster lifted the 407-foot rocket into space before detaching the upper stage section and deploying 20 satellite simulators along with two modified Starlinks that recorded footage of the spacecraft’s exterior.

The new third-generation rocket was supposed to return to Earth and make a simulated landing in the Gulf of Mexico. But their engines did not reignite properly, and instead they fell into the water below.

The problem occurred at the moment the rocket separated, according to SpaceX and the Federal Aviation Administration. SpaceX said in a post published Over the weekend, “slight variations in engine starting on board” caused the booster to be turned 90 degrees in the wrong direction. SpaceX said it has modified this engine startup sequence to allow the booster to “turn more reliably in the desired direction” and that the booster has been modified to “improve relight reliability.”

The most likely root causes of the Super Heavy booster failure are “thermal effects on propulsion system components during (the rocket’s) ascent and faulty engine alarm system settings,” the FAA said in a statement Monday. SpaceX said in its post that it has made changes to the Starship’s engine warning and shutdown systems that should reduce the chance of a similar failure in the future.

While the Starship V3 first upper stage was able to successfully deploy its test payload in May and simulate a landing in the Gulf — a major feat that SpaceX had struggled to reach before — it also did so while losing one of the three Raptor engines it was supposed to use in the vacuum of space. SpaceX said over the weekend that it had made “numerous hardware and operational modifications” to prevent this from happening again.

Starship’s next test flight will see the company launch its first V3 Starlink satellites into space, which should increase the satellite network’s capacity and user speeds. SpaceX plans to deploy 20 of these new satellites during launch. It is designed to communicate with the larger Starlink constellation “via high-capacity lasers” and then burn up in the atmosphere about 20 minutes after deployment, according to SpaceX. Six of them will be equipped with cameras to photograph the exterior of the spacecraft.

The V3 versions of both Starship and Starlink are essential to SpaceX’s future. Starlink was the only profitable part of SpaceX’s business in the run-up to its IPO, and SpaceX needs Starship Become a fully reusable missile system Even to attempt its galactic plans for space data centers and interplanetary travel.