Starship Plans a Tuesday Launch

The last two Starships sent up into space exploded midair, sending debris raining down on Earth. SpaceX now hopes for better results with the ninth unmanned test flight of its powerful new rocket, with a launch window from the Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas, set for Tuesday starting at 7:30pm local time, and a planned splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, reports ABC News. The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement last week that it had carried out a "comprehensive safety review" after the last "mishap" in March and found that "the company has satisfactorily addressed the causes of the mishap, and therefore, the Starship vehicle can return to flight."

That accident was reportedly caused by a "hardware failure" that led to fuel in one of the rocket's engines mixing and igniting. The March incident was preceded by one in January, in which too-strong vibrations led to propellant leaking, then an explosion. The Verge notes that SpaceX will be taking additional precautions for Tuesday's flight, which will place the Starship aircraft atop a previously launched 400-foot Super Heavy booster rocket powered by 33 Raptor engines. For Flight No. 9, the FAA will nearly double the Aircraft Hazard Area to 1,600 nautical miles, which will cover parts of Texas and Florida, as well as some parts of the Caribbean.

The launch is also set "during nonpeak transit periods," so as to "minimize disruption to US and international airspace users." Bloomberg reports that SpaceX chief Elon Musk himself will have an "all-hands-style" livestream chat with SpaceX staff on the X platform he owns, scheduled for noon local time on Tuesday. The Wall Street Journal has more on the "enormous bet" that SpaceX is making with the experimental Starship, which it hopes to send on a mission to Mars next year. Although the company has been shifting resources and workers over to Starship in recent months, "it's definitely been a rough start of the year" for the spacecraft, one SpaceX engineering exec wrote online after the March explosion. Watch the launch here. (More Starship stories.)