SpaceX to launch Starship test flight today, many upgrades to be checked

Elon Musk-owned SpaceX is scheduled to launch seventh test flight of Starship on Thursday. The test flight will test several new upgrades to Starship that are critical to space vehicle’s mission to take humans to Mars and beyond.

The success of Starship is critical to US space ambitions as the space vehicle is part of plans to take humans to Moon under Artemis-III. While NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket will take Orion spacecraft containing astronauts into space and launch them towards Moon, the Starship Human Landing System (HLS) will catch them in the lunar orbit and take them to Moon.

The SpaceX will conduct the Starship’s test flight’s launch at its Starbase facility in Texas. The launch window opens at 4 pm local time (3:30 am Friday IST). The launch can be watched on SpaceX’s X account or its website.

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The test flight will test a slew of new features and upgrades, such as redesigned propulsion system, new feedline for Raptor engines, reusing an engine for the first time, and redesigned avionic system.

At the end of the flight, the SpaceX will attempt to catch the SLH booster and Starship spaceship mid-air at the launch tower with mechanical arms dubbed ‘chopsticks’. Musk has dubbed the tower as ‘Mechazilla’.

Starship’s new features & upgrades to be tested

The SpaceX is testing a slew of new features and upgrades in the seventh test flight of Starship.

The Starship SLH is the most powerful rocket ever built. It is 121-metre tall.

Among the many firsts, the test flight will be the first in which Starship would test payload deployment. The SpaceX has said that Starship will take around 10 Starlink simulators which resemble next-generation Starlink satellites. The deployment would be the first exercise of a satellite deploy mission.

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In a post on its website, the SpaceX listed the following new features and upgrades that would be tested:

A block of planned upgrades to the Starship upper stage will debut on this flight test, bringing major improvements to reliability and performance.

• Starship’s forward flaps have been reduced in size and shifted towards the vehicle tip and away from the heat shield, significantly reducing their exposure to reentry heating while simplifying the underlying mechanisms and protective tiling

• The propulsion system has been redesigned, resulting in 25 per cent increase in propellent volume

• New fuel feedline system for Raptor vacuum engines

• Improved propulsion avionics module controlling vehicle valves and reading sensors,

• New-generation tiles along with back-up layer in heat shield to protect from missing or damaged tiles

The SpaceX said all of these features boost vehicle performance and add to the ability to fly longer missions.

The SpaceX further said that Starship’s avionics have undergone a complete redesign.

Avionics upgrades include a more powerful flight computer, integrated antennas which combine Starlink, GNSS, and backup radio frequency (RF) communication functions into each unit, redesigned inertial navigation and star tracking sensors, integrated smart batteries and power units that distribute data and 2.7MW of power across the ship to 24 high-voltage actuators, said SpaceX.

In one notable change, one of the 33 engines would be an engine from a previous Starship flight. Reusing all engines and components is critical for SpaceX to make its rockets maximally reusable, bring down cost, and reduce time between launches.