SpaceX has signed a contract with NASA worth around $4 billion to design and develop a human-rated Moonlander based on Starship’s design. Starship Lander is a central part of the NASA of the Artemis program, which aims to bring astronauts back to the moon in the next decade. For Starship to fly to the moon, SpaceX will need to refill it with ultra-cold propellant in low Earth orbit.
Musk sees the spacecraft as the interplanetary backbone for transporting cargo and people to Mars, one of his most consistent long-term goals. This also requires orbital refueling. Musk recently suggested that SpaceX may be ready to demonstrate ship-to-ship refueling in 2026. One year behind the target for 2025 NASA officials discussed it in December.
Starship will also launch SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink Internet satellite. Before Thursday’s launch, the ground crew loaded four Starlink mockups within Starship’s Payload Bay to test the rocket’s deployment mechanism. Authorities wanted to evaluate the heat shield performance of Starship Block 2 before attempting to retrieve the ship unharmedly on future missions (as SpaceX does with its already super-heavy booster). However, early termination of this test flight means that those purposes have to wait.
SpaceX oversees the spacecraft using iterative development cycles. Engineers come up with new designs, test them quickly, and incorporate the lessons learned in the next rocket. It’s no surprise to see some rockets explode using this spiral development cycle. However, failure to back-to-back may point to more fundamental issues, especially with so many similarities.
The flight plan entering Thursday’s mission called for spacecraft to be sent from Texas on a global journey, leading to a controlled re-entry of the Indian Ocean before flying northwest of Australia.
The test flight was thought to be a spaceship flight exchange prior to January 16th. This caused a fire in which the upper stage of the rocket (spacecraft or ship) was fueled by leaking propellant from the engine bay. Engineers determined that the most likely cause of propellant leaks was a harmonic reaction several times stronger than expected, suggesting that vibrations during the ship’s climb into space resonated with the vehicle’s natural frequencies. This would have strengthened the vibrations beyond what the engineers expected.
