SpaceX gears up for Starship Flight 13
SpaceX plans to conduct its next Starship launch as soon as July 16 to test fixes to issues from the previous flight and deploy functioning Starlink satellites.
The company said July 11 it is targeting a launch of the Flight 13 mission in a 90-minute window that opens at 6:45 p.m. Eastern from its Starbase, Texas, site. The announcement came a day after completing a static fire of the Super Heavy booster that will launch the mission.
The upcoming mission will fly a similar 65-minute suborbital profile as Flight 12 on May 22. That was the first flight of the upgraded version 3 of the vehicle and was mostly successful, although it experienced some anomalies.
The biggest issue was the failure of the Super Heavy booster to perform a controlled "soft" splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX said it traced the issue to how the engines in the Starship upper stage, or ship, ignited while still attached to the booster.
"At stage separation on Flight 12, slight differences in engine startup on the ship caused the directional flip of the booster to be off by approximately 90 degrees," the company stated in its preview of Flight 13. Five Raptor engines failed to ignite for a boostback burn, causing the burn to shut down early. The company did not elaborate on how the change in the flip direction affected the startup of the boostback burn.
"The startup sequence has been modified to be more robust to timing variability and more reliably flip in the desired direction, which is done to increase overall performance," SpaceX stated. "The Super Heavy on this upcoming flight has hardware modifications to improve relight reliability, along with updates to engine alarms and aborts to match the conditions seen in the multi-engine flight environment."
Flight 12 also suffered a Raptor engine failure during the booster's ascent, as well as one on the ship. "Several hardware and operational modifications have been made to address the interconnected causes, with additional reliability improvements planned in upcoming versions of the Raptor engine," the company said, but did not explain what those interconnected causes were.
Another change for Flight 13 involves the payloads that it will deploy from the upper stage during the suborbital flight. While several previous launches deployed mass simulators of Starlink V3 satellites, SpaceX said this mission will deploy 20 functioning Starlink V3 satellites.
SpaceX said the satellites will deploy solar arrays and antennas and then attempt to connect with both a South African ground station and other Starlink satellites. Those demonstrations will be brief since the satellites will be on the same suborbital trajectory as Starship and will reenter after a handful of minutes in space.
One factor in the timing of Flight 13 is the completion of a mishap investigation mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration after Flight 12. As of July 10, the FAA had not announced the completion of the investigation, which focused on the failure of Super Heavy to perform a soft splashdown.
If Flight 13 is successful, it may allow SpaceX to perform the first orbital launch of Starship on the next flight. SpaceX is pushing to get Starship into service to deploy Starlink V3 satellites, as well as for Starship's use as a lunar lander for NASA's Artemis lunar exploration campaign.
Thank you for reading the article!
