Elon Musk’s Towering SpaceX Rocket Set for Test Flight

That isn’t guaranteed. SpaceX has crashed vehicles before during test campaigns. Former employees have said risk taking is encouraged at the company to gain data to make improvements, so long as that doesn’t create safety risks.

“With a test such as this, success is measured by how much we can learn,” the company said in a statement posted to its website. A spokesman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for the Hawthorne, Calif.-based company, has been working on Starship for years. A predecessor to the vehicle now standing on a pad at the company’s Starbase launch complex east of Brownsville, Texas, was once dubbed “BFR” internally.

Starship has taken on an increasingly important role at the company. SpaceX has added staff—it has said it employs more than 1,800 people at the Texas site—built manufacturing facilities and developed launch infrastructure to support the vehicle. The privately held company doesn’t disclose financial information, including how much it has invested into the Starship program.

SpaceX plans to use Starship for its Starlink satellite-internet business, the driver of its roughly $140 billion valuation, as well as for deploying satellites for customers and handling flights for private astronauts. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has hired SpaceX to transport two U.S. astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon using a version of Starship. 

That mission, part of the agency’s Artemis exploration effort, is currently set for 2025. 

“We need to get a lot of time on that machine,” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell

Longer term, the company has said it would launch interplanetary journeys using the vehicle.

For now, the company is looking to start to prove it can operate the powerful rocket.

The first flight is important for building toward regular launches and the bigger missions the company has planned, said Griff Russell, a former SpaceX vehicle manager who worked on the development campaign for its Falcon 9 rocket. 

“Whatever happens on this, there’s something to fix, fold back into the line and launch again. You’ve got to get into that cadence and it’s really hard to do. It requires laser focus,” said Mr. Russell, who now runs a space-management firm.  

Fully stacked, the vehicle stands nearly 400 feet tall. It consists of a 226-foot-tall booster, called Super Heavy, equipped with 33 engines SpaceX created in-house. Super Heavy is designed to power a separate, 164-foot spacecraft, also called Starship, that sits on top of it at the start of a launch into space. The Starship craft is where crews or other materials could be stationed during future flights. 

SpaceX is aiming to make Starship fully reusable, versus its Falcon rockets, which rely on boosters the company can use multiple times.

“There has never been a fully reusable orbital launch vehicle,” Mr. Musk said at an event hosted by The Wall Street Journal in late 2021. “There are times where I wonder whether we can actually do this.”

Andy Lapsa, co-founder of Stoke Space Technologies Inc., a startup that is aiming to develop its own fully reusable rocket, said designing and building such vehicles is challenging. “Just doing what’s been done before is very hard,” said Mr. Lapsa, a former engineer at Blue Origin LLC, Jeff Bezos ’ space company.

Rocket providers working to develop fully reusable rockets need to be able to land a booster back on Earth after a launch, requiring additional gear and fuel, he said, while the ship the booster blasts into orbit has to be able to survive intense heat when it re-enters the atmosphere. 

SpaceX has a more limited set of objectives for Starship’s first test flight to space. 

Assuming the vehicle takes off, the company has said the Super Heavy booster is expected to fly for about three minutes before the Starship craft separates from it to begin flying on its own. The booster will shortly thereafter aim to conduct a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. 

Starship is expected to reach an altitude of about 146 miles as it flies on its own, according to an official at the Federal Aviation Administration, which said on Friday evening it licensed the launch and will monitor the flight. The craft is slated to land in the Pacific Ocean, near a Hawaiian island. SpaceX won’t recover that vehicle, the FAA official said. 

Before any launch, the company will need to fuel up both parts of the vehicle with liquid oxygen and liquid methane, according to a timeline posted to the company’s website. 

Write to Micah Maidenberg at [email protected]