SpaceX is set to launch its Starship rocket yet again on Monday at 6:30 p.m. from its Gulf Coast launch site in Boca Chica, Texas. The last Starship launch, Flight 7, ended with an explosion over the Turks and Caicos after an internal propellant leak. Hopefully the spacecraft will splash down intact this time. Elon Musk’s private space company blows up rockets as a matter of course to improve future iterations while everyone else has to clean up the mess.
The two-stage rocket will lift four dummy Starlink satellites into space, according to Space.com. The company clearly knows this could go wrong and would rather not lose four real satellites. The reusable first-stage Super Heavy booster will separate from Starship and return to SpaceX’s Texas facility for a chopstick catch landing, the only component of the flight that SpaceX has seemingly mastered. The spacecraft will continue its ascent, deploy the dummies, and then splash down in the Indian Ocean.
Musk talks a big game, but only occasionally delivers
Beyond the debris of Flight 7 washing up on the shores of the Turks and Caicos, the rest of society has been expected to yield to SpaceX operations. The space company’s last-minute decisions have heavily impacted flights across the Indian Ocean. Qantas was forced to delay several flights between Sydney, Australia and Johannesburg, South Africa. Other carriers were also impacted, and delays were up to six hours for passengers.
While Musk is quick to criticize the issues with the Space Launch System, delays with Starship’s development have also hampered NASA’s Artemis program. SpaceX still has a contract to provide NASA with a Starship lander for the 21st-century’s first crewed mission to the Moon. Musk might be a vocal critic of the renewed effort to put people on the Moon, but he’s still ecstatic to collect hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government. The bumbling billionaire might aspire to colonize Mars, but he can only ferry astronauts to a space station he wants to destroy.
