SpaceX plans the next Starship flight for mid-November

WASHINGTON — SpaceX has scheduled its next Starship test flight for Nov. 18, making incremental changes since the previous flight in October.

The company announced on November 6 that it is planning the sixth integrated Starship/Super Heavy flight from its Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas, for the afternoon of November 18. The announcement coincided with the Federal Aviation Administration lifting airspace restrictions on the attempted flight.

SpaceX described the upcoming flight as one intended to “expand the capabilities of ships and boosters and get closer to bringing the entire system reuse online.” The flight will follow a similar suborbital profile as the previous flight of October 13including an attempt to return the Super Heavy booster to the launch site for a “catch” at the launch tower.

Among the changes for this flight is the re-ignition of a Raptor engine on Starship in flight to demonstrate the ability to perform a deorbit burn on future orbital missions. SpaceX had planned a similar test during the vehicle’s third flight in Marchbut did not attempt it due to the vehicle’s rolling speeds.

SpaceX plans to test changes to the thermal protection system on Starship. “The flight test will evaluate new secondary thermal protection materials and remove entire sections of heat shield tiles on either side of the ship in locations being investigated for hardware for future vehicles,” the company said. SpaceX plans to eventually recover Starship using the same launch tower “catch” technique used for the Super Heavy Booster.

The spacecraft will also fly at a higher angle of attack during its final descent, “deliberately emphasizing the limits of flap control to provide data on future landing profiles.”

To assist with these return observations, SpaceX is changing the launch time for this mission. While previous launches have taken place in the morning at Starbase, this flight is scheduled to launch within a 30-minute window, beginning at 5:00 PM Eastern. Doing so will result in Starship’s landing in the Indian Ocean during the day, instead of at night as was previously the case.

SpaceX is also tweaking the Super Heavy booster. The company said it is building additional redundancy into the booster’s propulsion system, increasing structural strength in unspecified “key areas” and reducing the time to remove propellants from the booster after it returns. Engineers “also updated software controls and established criteria for booster launch and return.”

In a short audio recording posted by SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk on October 25SpaceX officials could be heard saying that they came within a second of aborting the previous Super Heavy capture due to a “misconfigured” parameter related to the Raptor engines in the booster. They noted that the capture attempt included “a whole new set of abort and commit criteria” that they had not been able to fully verify before launch, adding that they had since reviewed the data from that flight and determined what to do change.

If the upcoming flight maintains the current schedule, it will be the fastest turnaround among Starship/Super Heavy test flights at just over five weeks. One reason SpaceX is able to move so quickly is that the FAA license issued in October for the fifth flight also allowed SpaceX to conduct a sixth flight.

“The SpaceX Starship/Super Heavy Flight 5 license authorization also includes FAA approval of the Flight 6 mission profile,” the agency stated in the Flight 5 license announcement on October 12. “The FAA has approved the changes requested by SpaceX for Flight 6. are within the scope of what has been previously analyzed.” The FAA did not reveal at the time what changes SpaceX had requested.

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