SpaceX aims to launch its next Starship aircraft as soon as early May, as Elon Musk’s aerospace company looks to grow on its streak of progress with the vehicles.
President and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell told a crowd at the Satellite 2024 conference Tuesday that SpaceX was still reviewing the data from its March 14 attempt. That flight — its third with the 400-foot-tall mega-rocket — flew further than SpaceX’s first two attempts. While the launch started as expected, the aircraft broke apart at about 65 kilometers — or 40 miles — and was lost in the late stages of reentry. The Super Heavy booster also exploded during the final stages of its fall into the Gulf of Mexico during a planned landing burn.
“It was an incredibly successful flight. We hit exactly where we wanted to go,” Shotwell said, according to Space News.
The SpaceX president added that the company will figure out what happened during both stages and “get back to flight hopefully in about six weeks.” That would be a much faster turnaround than SpaceX is used to; its second launch was in November 2023, about seven months after its original attempt in April 2023.
Despite speculation and Musk’s enthusiasm for the idea, Shotwell said the company doesn’t plan to deploy Starlink satellites on the next Starship launch.
Kevin Coleman, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) associate administrator for commercial space transportation, told Payload on Monday night that the agency is working to ease the launch approval process for Starship. The industry and U.S. Congress have criticized the FAA for moving too slowly on approving launch licenses under current regulations.
SpaceX aims to launch between 6 and 9 more Starship flights in 2024. The administrator also told Payload that the FAA’s mishap investigation into the March 14 flight will likely be short.
“We didn’t see anything major. We don’t think there’s any critical systems for safety that were implicated,” Coleman said. “Usually, if there’s not any critical systems for safety implicated, the mishap investigation can be pretty clean, and it can move pretty quickly.”
In response to Coleman’s comments on the launch approval process, Musk tweeted, “This would be great.”