Third time's the charm? SpaceX hopes rocket launch goes as planned

SpaceX will attempt to launch its 122-metre tall or 37-storey - mega-rocket on its third test flight on Thursday.

The Starship rocket is SpaceX founder Elon Musk's pet project that he says will not only be able to spit out ever more Starlink satellites but also eventually take hu‐ mans to Mars.

But the bigger, more pressing goal is to prove that Starship will be ready for NASA's Artemis III mission to the moon, slated to launch in 2026.

A variation of the SpaceX vessel, called the Human Landing System (HLS), will be critical to putting humans on the lunar surface. In order to do so, SpaceX needs to clear a number of hurdles, includ‐ ing demonstrating a ship-toship transfer of fuel.

But so far, Starship has seen only incremental achievements.

This launch is referred to as Starship's integrated flight test three (IFT-3), as it is the third time that both the booster and the spaceship it‐ self are being launched to‐ gether.

From the public's perspec‐ tive, IFT-1 and IFT-2 were un‐ mitigated failures.

In the first, last April, the rocket cleared its gargantuan tower before blowing up just four minutes later - Musk and his fans like to use the term "a rapid unscheduled disassembly" - before the booster stage and spaceship could separate.

And that was only what happened in the air.

Back on terra firma, the aftermath was vast. Because IFT-1 went up without a launch suppression system at the pad - something to soften the fiery blast and shockwave - its 33 engines left an enormous crater be‐ low the launch pad. Debris was scattered for kilometres, leading to a barrage of rec‐ ommendations from federal officials about how to best minimize the harm to the surrounding ecosystem by future launches.

The second test flight, last November, had a suppres‐ sion system in place and caused minimal damage to the pad. The rocket success‐ fully lifted off and the two stages managed to separate successfully - a demonstra‐ tion of a new way of separa‐ tion called "hot staging."

Unfortunately, the first stage was lost in an explo‐ sion. The second managed to make it into space, reaching 149 kilometres, before it, too, exploded.

While explosions aren't something the public typical‐ ly deems as achievements, that's not the way space watchers necessarily see it. And certainly not SpaceX.

It deemed IFT-1 a success because it cleared the pad without exploding.

The second was touted as a success for proving that hot-staging - when the sec‐ ond stage booster ignites as the first separates - worked. And, as Musk said later, the second stage reached space before exploding.

But with Artemis III breathing down its neck, SpaceX needs to rack up more concrete wins.

Engineer and former NASA official Dan Dumbach‐ er is hesitant to label the past Starship launches as either successes or failures.

WATCH | Starship criti‐ cal for planned Mars mis‐ sion:

"If I had been looking at it with my old NASA badge on in my old NASA world, they're failures, because NASA has to operate in an environment where [they've] got, as I say, 536 investors watching over my shoulder, making sure I'm using public money appropri‐ ately," he said.

For SpaceX and others in the private sector, it's "a little bit of a different ball game," said Dumbacher, who is now CEO of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronau‐ tics.

"When you have Elon, or [ Jeff Bezos] funding things, the buck all stops with them" - their private money allows them to operate differently, being somewhat less risk averse than NASA.

But with NASA relying on the triumph of commercial entities, things begin to change: progress needs to be made.

Paul Fjeld, who collabo‐ rated with NASA during the Apollo program, is confident that despite the enormous challenges ahead, SpaceX can rise to the occasion, though perhaps not in the current timeline.

"The engineering chops are there, and that's been demonstrated since the start of it," he said.

WATCH | Second test flight ends in explosions:

What to expect with IFT3

For IFT-3, SpaceX has a few specific objectives. As always, reaching suborbit for the first time - not orbit, technically, as Starship is meant to splash down in the Indian Ocean without circling the globe - is a big one.

But it also plans to test Starship's payload bay doors and, possibly, the fuel trans‐ fer system within the spaceship itself, a sort of pre‐ cursor to the ship-to-ship transfer needed for Artemis III.

SpaceX might also look at

the tiles, many of which were missing on the vessel after the second launch. The tiles are crucial to protect the spaceship from the intense heat of re-entry, as was made clear during the age of NASA's space shuttle pro‐ gram.

In order to reach NASA's safety requirements, SpaceX's HLS system will need to see close to 14 com‐ plete successful launches, and those won't be based on SpaceX's metric of "success." They all must be unqualified successes.

Seeing as this is just the third flight of the integrated system, it seems there's a long way to go.

Not that it's completely out of reach. Musk recently said the company has ap‐ plied for nine Starship launches in 2024. And SpaceX's Star Base in Boca Chica, Texas, is always a hub of activity with boosters and Starships stacked up in rows.

"The thing that Musk does better than probably any‐ body else in any industry is to scale up and produce things at scale, in large quan‐ tities very quickly," Fjeld said.

"I think he could easily you know, fly again in two months, and then a monthand-a-half, and then a month later, and then every week for the rest of the year at the end."

For now, all eyes will be on what happens during IFT3,

to see if SpaceX achieves the milestones set out before it, and if it can collect enough data to fly again in rapid suc‐ cession.

If SpaceX can't, seeing new boot prints on the moon may be farther off than NASA or other space-watchers may like.