[UPDATED] The Fourth Starship Flight Launch: Splashdown Confirmed! Mission Is Successful!

Starship Launch Update 2: 6th June

Splashdown Confirmed!

Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team! Starship experienced peak heating and maintained a good entry trajectory. It successfully completed its first-ever re-entry burn, then initiated its landing burn and splashed down in the ocean. Despite taking a beating on re-entry, it made it through!

Starship Launch Update 1: 6th June

The First Successful Splashdown of the Super Heavy Booster

SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster has successfully splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico. The mission saw a series of critical manoeuvres and operations executed flawlessly:

• Starship’s Raptor engines ignited precisely during the hot-staging separation, a crucial phase where the spacecraft transitions from one stage to the next.
• Following this, Super Heavy executed its flip maneuver and boost back burn with precision, demonstrating the advanced capabilities of SpaceX’s reusable rocket technology.
  
  For now, Elon Musk confirmed that Starship has an acquisition signal. 11 internal cameras are transmitting. The team is figuring out why external cameras aren’t. The next stage is reentry.

The fourth Starship flight gets green light

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Tuesday, 4 June, issued a launch license to SpaceX for its Starship Flight 4 test mission, which is currently scheduled to lift off no earlier than Thursday, June 6, from the company’s Starbase facility near Boca Chica Beach in South Texas. 

“The FAA has approved a license authorization for SpaceX Starship Flight 4,” FAA officials wrote in a statement. “SpaceX met all safety and other licensing requirements for this test flight.”

Earlier, we reported that the Starship Raptor engine exploded during today’s raptor testing at the McGregor test site in Texas.

After the successful third Starship launch in March 2024, SpaceX is already preparing for the fourth flight. Apparently, as Starship finally reached orbit and performed a number of tests in space, the company is now aiming for 6 June as the next Starship launch date.

Launch Rehearsal For Starship Next Flight Is Complete

Updated on 21st May

SpaceX has announced on X that the launch rehearsal for Flight 4 is complete. Elon Musk also confirmed readiness for launch in two weeks.

Static Fire Test Is Completed!

Updated on 28th March

Ship 29 so far has conducted two cryogenic proof tests, as well as a Spin Prime test of all six engines. The first static fire test was conducted earlier in the week. The initial Static Fire featured all six engines.

On 27 March, a second overpressure notice was distributed to residents of Boca Chica Village, meaning that another static fire on Ship 29 is likely to happen today.

Flight 4 Starship: All We Know So Far

SpaceX is preparing for the fourth Starship flight, which could happen in the first half of May.

Speaking at the Satellite 2024 conference on 19 March, Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, said the company was still reviewing the data from the vehicle’s third integrated launch on 14 March but expected to be ready to fly again soon.

“We’re still going through the data” from the flight, she said when asked about the analysis of data from the mission. “It was an incredibly successful flight. We hit exactly where we wanted to go.”

 SpaceX recently shared a video of the rocket’s Raptor engines undergoing a static fire test ahead of the fourth Starship flight. A 165-foot-tall (50 meters) Starship upper stage just fired up all six of its Raptor engines test at SpaceX’s Starbase site in South Texas, the company announced on 25 March.

During the next Starship flight, the colossal booster needs to separate about three minutes after liftoff and drop into the Gulf of Mexico. The rocket should then fly in space around Earth before splashing down in the Indian Ocean. The whole journey should last a little more than one hour.

This is a crucial demonstration of hardware that NASA is depending on to get humans back on the moon in the next few years. And, if successful, it’ll mean Musk is one small step closer to realizing his personal dream of building a city on Mars.