Starship Flight 9 to launch next week: Elon Musk

SpaceX Founder and CEO, Elon Musk, has said the Starship Flight 9 could launch as soon as next week, which falls inline with previous reports.

SpaceX has been preparing for this new flight since March, but its objectives are way more challenging than the last few tests. The reason for that are the Flight 7 and 8, which perfected the Super Heavy booster catch. However, the ship is facing hardware problems and losing engines during ascent burn before it even completes, which is important to complete the sub-orbital milestones.

The Starship team has identified these issues and applied fixes in the new ship employed with Flight 7. SpaceX revealed this new upper stage has more performance than the previous version.

SpaceX Starship Liftoff

To prepare for this new flight, SpaceX has performed ship’s static fire, not once but twice. These two test runs enabled the company to verify the propulsion and engine ignition for 30 seconds and 60 seconds. Both tests reflect on the progress, but the real launch is all that matters.

On the other hand, the Starship Flight 9 launch will be carried with Super Heavy booster 15. This will be the first time, when SpaceX will reuse a booster in the Starship test program. This booster was used during Flight 7 and its reusable version has 29 out of 33 flight proven Raptor engines.

A previous report suggests that the company could launch Starship Flight 9 as soon as Tuesday, May 20, but we’re still waiting for an official date on this matter.