Sunday update: Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, Posted on his social media platform X on Sunday The company announced it has completed 57 corrective actions required before the Starship rocket’s second integrated test flight. Before the upcoming mission, he further six corrective measures will be implemented. This article has been updated to include Musk’s statement.
The Federal Aviation Administration announced Friday that it has concluded its investigation into problems that SpaceX encountered during its first full-scale Starship test launch in April, but federal regulators have yet to greenlight Starship’s next flight. Probably not.
“The conclusion of the accident investigation does not indicate an immediate resumption of Starship launches at Boca Chica,” the FAA said in a statement, referring to the location of SpaceX’s Starship launch facility on Boca Chica Beach in south Texas.
The 400-foot-tall Starship rocket, the largest ever built, is on a launchpad in Texas ready for its next test flight. Test flights could occur by the end of this month, pending FAA approval.
If all goes to plan, the rocket’s super-heavy booster, powered by 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines, will burn for nearly three minutes before Starship’s upper stage ignites its own Raptor engines and accelerates to near-orbital speeds. . Take the vehicle on a flight three-quarters of the way around the Earth. The booster will attempt a controlled descent to a splashdown point in the Gulf of Mexico to test maneuvers for future flights to recover and reuse the rocket.
However, Starship’s first test flight did not get very far. SpaceX recently submitted its findings to the FAA regarding its Starship test launch, which lasted about four minutes after liftoff on April 20th.
Multiple Raptor engines in the rocket’s super heavy booster failed, causing the craft to lose steering and twist uncontrollably in the upper atmosphere. An autonomous self-destruct system issues a command to detonate the rocket, but it takes longer than expected for the starship to disintegrate. The rocket finally disintegrated into a ball of flame.
The FAA’s Friday statement confirmed that federal regulators have completed their review of SpaceX’s accident investigation report, which found that the April 20 test flight ended in multiple crashes minutes after takeoff. It cites the root cause. SpaceX deemed the test flight a success because engineers were able to collect data on the rocket’s performance. The FAA said the accident investigation report itself contains proprietary SpaceX data and information subject to U.S. export control laws and cannot be made available to the public.
“The FAA has been fully informed and accepts the root cause and corrective actions outlined in the accident report,” said Marcus Ward, manager of the FAA’s Safety Assurance Division. Letter to SpaceX. “As a result, the FAA considers the accident investigation that SpaceX was required to complete to be completed.”
SpaceX must now convince the FAA that it has checked off a list of corrective actions to prevent the same failure from occurring on the next Starship test flight. SpaceX said in a statement Friday that lessons learned from the April 20 launch “will directly contribute to several upgrades being made to both the vehicle and ground infrastructure to increase the probability of success for future Starship flights.” ” he said.
