When Will SpaceX Launch Starship Flight 6?

[jongoff]

Ok, Starship Flight Five is on the books, so I'm creating a poll for Flight 6 timing. In this case I decided not to mince phrasing between IFT-6 vs Flight 6. Just saying when will the next Starship flight be? Theoretically, if they don't change parameters from what they submitted to the FAA for the launch license for Flight 5, there won't be a new launch license required, and I believe the FAA said that the Flight 5 mission fell within the parameters outlined by SpaceX so they weren't requiring any sort of investigation after this flight.

I provided more granularity further to the right on this one since literally everyone got the previous one wrong.

I'm going to leave this one live for one week, once again to force people to make decisions based on imperfect information.

~Jon

[jongoff]

I voted early December. They don't have an investigation or major damage to repair to the launch site, so in theory they could fly as early as later this month. But given that the TPS fixes only sort of worked, and they identified issues with the heating on the booster engines during reentry, I'd be surprised if they just flew another flight without tweaking anything. But my guess is they'll try to fly again soon.

~Jon

[DanClemmensen]

Early November, for my birthday.
Early November would be for a Ship to test engine relight in 0 g.

[jongoff]

Early November, for my birthday.
Early November would be for a Ship to test engine relight in 0 g.

Hmm... I could see that. That's the one reason I could see for them trying to push such a rapid reflight -- if demoing the in-space relight (without implementing many changes to fix lessons learned from Flight Five) allowed them to shift to payload deploying operational flights, and move reuse exploration into something done after the paying mission is over (like they did for F9), that could be worth it. I'm still sticking with my early December estimate, but I'd love to be wrong. :-)

~Jon

[Eer]

Early November, for my birthday.
Early November would be for a Ship to test engine relight in 0 g.

While I agree on the purpose (relight test), I'll give them to the end of November.

Relight is needed to safely allow orbital operations, including launches of payloads and serious efforts like rendezvous refueling, etc. Major priorities for each.

[redneck]

I went with late December to make it a Christmas present. In reality, I'm so bad at these predictions that I'm not even trying to be serious anymore.

[jongoff]

I went with late December to make it a Christmas present. In reality, I'm so bad at these predictions that I'm not even trying to be serious anymore.

For the sake of the Starship team, that I hope gets to take Christmas off after a grueling year, I hope you're wrong.

[sstli2]

They aren't going to launch for the sake of doing so. They are going to launch because they stand to learn something from the flight. Typically they've made a number of incremental changes between flights and have validated those changes through the subsequent flight.

Right now, the most obvious technical hurdles are thermal protection (both booster engines as well as the recurring flap issue). They'll probably want to work through those issues, which will take at least a month, ignoring any off-the-cuff deadlines Musk decides to tweet. They'll probably also want to add onto the flight plan, which means the FAA will require some time to process it.

All in all, late December is the earliest I can envision.

[deltaV]

I voted early January because we were all way too optimistic last time and people often take vacations around Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's.

[AmigaClone]

I voted early January because we were all way too optimistic last time and people often take vacations around Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's

I imagine that there is a 20-25% chance of ITF-6 by the end of the year, 50% in January and 25% NET February provided ITF-6 can use the same license as ITF-5. If the FAA determines that the flight plan for ITF-6 needs a new license, the earliest a launch would occur would likely be in late January, with March or later being a real possibility.

[jongoff]

Ok, Starship Flight Five is on the books, so I'm creating a poll for Flight 6 timing. In this case I decided not to mince phrasing between IFT-6 vs Flight 6. Just saying when will the next Starship flight be? Theoretically, if they don't change parameters from what they submitted to the FAA for the launch license for Flight 5, there won't be a new launch license required, and I believe the FAA said that the Flight 5 mission fell within the parameters outlined by SpaceX so they weren't requiring any sort of investigation after this flight.

I provided more granularity further to the right on this one since literally everyone got the previous one wrong.

I'm going to leave this one live for one week, once again to force people to make decisions based on imperfect information.

~Jon

I think you’re presuming the details of the mission profile for IFY-6. 

The answer depends on what is to be accomplished.  In other words, if IFY-6 is going to attempt a lunar landing… that might take a couple days less than if IFY-6 is going to land on Mars.

Does the lunar landing have to be fully reusable once it lands back on Earth?  Or maybe the reusability can wait for IFY-7. 

Michael Bay might want to be present for next the Starship landing.

I tried to deliberately leave the question somewhat vague to allow people to apply their own assumptions on what Flight 6 is most likely going to be. We probably won't have a definitive plan between now and when the poll closes, so people will have to combine their best guess at what they'll go for with the flight with what that means for the schedule. Yeah, that's a lot of uncertainty stackup, but it's not like being wrong costs anyone anything.

Me, personally, I think they're going to try to balance Flight 6 goals to optimize between how soon they can fly again, and what would allow them to make the most progress for the program. Not sure if that'll mean trying to add an in-space relight/burn (which would likely require an updated FAA license and run the risk of delays on that front), or just stick with the current flight path, and just try to work on updating the things they learned from this flight. My guess is the former, which means my early December guess is actually pretty optimistic.

But anyway, we'd love to hear your opinion both on what you think the most likely goals are for the next flight, and based on that, when you think it will happen. If you're open to sharing.

~Jon

~Jon

[fishbait]

Barge landing of starship

[Lampyridae]

Early December for me, based on a general impression of how long the testing cycle actually takes, FAA permit uncertainty and also new tricks SpaceX might want to do since Flight 5 was so successful. The pessimist in me says late December though. Even so, I can't see it slipping to 2025 at all barring a huge surprise.

[Yggdrasill]

They aren't going to launch for the sake of doing so. They are going to launch because they stand to learn something from the flight. Typically they've made a number of incremental changes between flights and have validated those changes through the subsequent flight.

Right now, the most obvious technical hurdles are thermal protection (both booster engines as well as the recurring flap issue). They'll probably want to work through those issues, which will take at least a month, ignoring any off-the-cuff deadlines Musk decides to tweet. They'll probably also want to add onto the flight plan, which means the FAA will require some time to process it.

All in all, late December is the earliest I can envision.

The fix for the flaps is the next version of Starship, and the reentry heating issue on Super Heavy probably doesn't need any significant hardware change. I actually think they would get pretty far in fixing it just by reducing the amount of propellant they are returning with. Less mass means less kinetic energy that needs to be removed. The booster will slow down faster and higher up in the atmosphere.

They may have included the excess propellant for increased aerodynamic stability on reentry, so the natural progression of testing would be to reduce it, even without attempting to reduce heating. And if they don't reduce it enough by reducing propellant load on reentry, I think they would just pre-chill the outer engines.

I'm assuming minimal hardware changes before the next flight, but some changes to the flight plan for an in-orbit burn and possibly a payload bay door test, so I'll go with November 25th.

[DanClemmensen]

They may have included the excess propellant for increased aerodynamic stability on reentry, so the natural progression of testing would be to reduce it, even without attempting to reduce heating. And if they don't reduce it enough by reducing propellant load on reentry, I think they would just pre-chill the outer engines.

I think the extra prop was contingency reserve. First, 13 October was ideal weather, so no prop was needed to add time to correct for wind. Second, extra prop would allow a last-second abort to the ocean.

[tyrred]

Late January 2025. Hopefully on my birthday, that would be icing on the 🍰

[catdlr]

I'll jump in here and suspect Early December. 

Need to be done first: Complete the outfit of the next starship with the new ablative and heat shield. The Static Fire was already completed last week. Current issues with booster engine warping and excess fuel dump at landing (extra credit).

Proposed Accomplishment: Re-ignite engines and de-orbit:
The only significant accomplishment they can achieve using the existing license is flying again to test out re-lighting the Ship's engines to deorbit the ship. Initially, with no engine intervention, the default orbit would take them to a splashdown off the Hawaii coast. Then, at the appropriate moment over the South Atlantic, they re-orient the ship and re-start the engines to bring the starship to a splashdown in the Indian Ocean as IFT-5.

Possible issues:
Indonesian overflight was brought up earlier this year.

IFT-7 can jump forward and start using V2.

Tony

[jongoff]

I'll jump in here and suspect Early December. 

Need to be done first: Complete the outfit of the next starship with the new ablative and heat shield. The Static Fire was already completed last week. Current issues with booster engine warping and excess fuel dump at landing (extra credit).

Proposed Accomplishment: Re-ignite engines and de-orbit:
The only significant accomplishment they can achieve using the existing license is flying again to test out re-lighting the Ship's engines to deorbit the ship. Initially, with no engine intervention, the default orbit would take them to a splashdown off the Hawaii coast. Then, at the appropriate moment over the South Atlantic, they re-orient the ship and re-start the engines to bring the starship to a splashdown in the Indian Ocean as IFT-5.

Possible issues:
Indonesian overflight was brought up earlier this year.

IFT-7 can jump forward and start using V2.

Tony

My guess is that if they wanted to do the engine relight like that, even though the reentry point would be the same, they'd probably have to get an updated FAA license, because there's a chance the engine relight won't work, and a chance that it'll partially work, so they'll have to do the analysis on both of those scenarios to make sure the E_c is in an acceptable range. That said, I don't think the hold-up last time was on the normal FAA analysis, but on the environmental stuff, so if it's just an FAA license update, it might still be possible to make it happen within two months. I hope they do that though, because they really need to have orbit insertion and deorbit proven out so they can transition to flights where they're delivering revenue generating payloads (Starlink or 3rd party) and where the EDL/recovery stuff is bonus experimentation, like they had with Falcon 9.

IOW, I hope you're right about them going for that in this next flight.

~Jon

[catdlr]

I'll jump in here and suspect Early December. 

Need to be done first: Complete the outfit of the next starship with the new ablative and heat shield. The Static Fire was already completed last week. Current issues with booster engine warping and excess fuel dump at landing (extra credit).

Proposed Accomplishment: Re-ignite engines and de-orbit:
The only significant accomplishment they can achieve using the existing license is flying again to test out re-lighting the Ship's engines to deorbit the ship. Initially, with no engine intervention, the default orbit would take them to a splashdown off the Hawaii coast. Then, at the appropriate moment over the South Atlantic, they re-orient the ship and re-start the engines to bring the starship to a splashdown in the Indian Ocean as IFT-5.

Possible issues:
Indonesian overflight was brought up earlier this year.

IFT-7 can jump forward and start using V2.

Tony

My guess is that if they wanted to do the engine relight like that, even though the reentry point would be the same, they'd probably have to get an updated FAA license, because there's a chance the engine relight won't work, and a chance that it'll partially work, so they'll have to do the analysis on both of those scenarios to make sure the E_c is in an acceptable range. That said, I don't think the hold-up last time was on the normal FAA analysis, but on the environmental stuff, so if it's just an FAA license update, it might still be possible to make it happen within two months. I hope they do that though, because they really need to have orbit insertion and deorbit proven out so they can transition to flights where they're delivering revenue generating payloads (Starlink or 3rd party) and where the EDL/recovery stuff is bonus experimentation, like they had with Falcon 9.

IOW, I hope you're right about them going for that in this next flight.

~Jon

To clarify, the initial orbit (sub or ballistic, whatever you want to call that) lands north of Hawaii with no engine re-light.  If the engine re-lights for deorbit, the touchdown will head to the Indian Ocean.  Still, Indonesia needs to approve overflight.

It's like Tony's Infographic for IFT-2, but add a ship flip and engine de-orbit burn, then re-originate and duplicate the remainder for the Indian Ocean (keep the Pacific Ocean landing as the backup).  The booster also comes back for a Mechazilla catch.

[Enthor]

"Best possible guess Mr. Sulu",  I figure late November without any critical thinking on my behalf.