SpaceX chief Elon Musk said on Monday that the Starship rocket will make its 10th test flight in August.
Musk made the announcement in a post on X, saying, “Starship launches again next month.” Additional details about a specific date have yet to be shared by Musk or SpaceX, but multiple reports over recent weeks have suggested that the 10th flight of the world’s most powerful rocket could take place in the first half of the month.
In further evidence suggesting that SpaceX is moving swiftly toward its next test mission, the company shared photos of the upper-stage spacecraft being taken to the launchpad for preflight testing at its Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas.
It’s a big moment for SpaceX as the last time it conducted preflight testing on the Starship spacecraft, it blew up.
The cause of last month’s massive explosion was put down to a failure in a nosecone-based pressurized tank called a COPV (Composite Overwrapped Pressure Vessel), which contains gaseous nitrogen. The failure triggered a catastrophic chain reaction that destroyed the vehicle and damaged the test site.
Last week, Musk also said that shortly before the 10th test flight, he will give a technical update about the Starship, “going over progress to date and engineering/production/launch plans for the future.”
NASA and SpaceX are aiming to use the Starship for crew and cargo flights to the moon in the upcoming Artemis missions. The first of these is likely to involve the use of a modified version of the upper-stage spacecraft to land two astronauts on the lunar surface in the Artemis III mission in what would be NASA’s first human landing there since the final Apollo mission in 1972. The Artemis III mission is currently targeted for 2027, though that date could slip.
Musk is also keen to see the Starship used for the first-ever crewed mission to Mars. While he’s spoken of such a mission taking place before the end of this decade, it seems unlikely to happen until the 2030s at the very earliest.
The 120-meter-tall Starship first flew in April 2023, and its most recent flight took place in May of this year. While the vehicle is making progress in terms of overall performance, there’s still much testing to be done before it becomes operational.
