Starship Flight 8 could happen on Friday – SpaceX Founder

SpaceX founder and chief executive officer, Elon Musk said that the Starship Flight 8 will fly on Friday, which falls under the late February flying schedule.

A recent FAA airspace advisory on Starship Flight 8 revealed a possible launch window opening on February 27/28 until March 5/06 2025. Claiming the first date isn’t surprising as all preparations for this launch are already completed.

Starship is an integrated space rocket designed to take heavy payload to orbit, the Moon, Mars, and other planets. The rocket consists of two stages – booster and ship. The booster consists of 33 Raptor engines generating over 7500 tf of thrust at liftoff. The ship has six Raptor engines and 100-150 tons of payload capacity.

Both stages are designed for reusability, which means these two can return to the launch site and can be reused in the next flight. However, the rocket requires more testing to ensure commercial flight readiness.

In the past year, SpaceX has successfully separated and landed the first stage in between the catch tower’s robotic arm. The rocket maker also reused one of the flight-proven Raptor engines from the Flight 5 booster in Flight 7.

Credit – SpaceX

However, the upper stage’s journey to space is a bit more complicated than the booster. It needs to check all of the payload safety and landing parameters while reaching the destination.

Flight 7 was quite devasting for the ship as it lost telemetry as soon as the engine burn phase. Eventually, the rocket occurred with unscheduled vehicle disassembly and scattered in the sky. Prior to that, SpaceX successfully flew the ship twice in the sub-orbital plane and splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

Flight 7’s upper-stage failure is liked to its next-generation ship employed for the first test launch. It seems Starship Flight 8 has an improved ship and the chances for its success are pretty high, we’ll wait to see this mega-rocket flying on Friday but we’ll have to wait for an official launch window.