SpaceX knocks out overnight Space Coast launch while Starship attempt from Texas could come soon

SpaceX went about its Falcon 9 business again with an overnight launch of a communications satellite from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, but over in Texas, the Starship and Super Heavy have been stacked and await the OK to go from the Federal Aviation Administration.

The launch at 12:30 a.m. Friday from Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40 sent the Intelsat IS-40e satellite to geosynchronous transfer orbit. Attached to the satellite is a NASA instrument built by Ball Aerospace known as TEMPO, which stands for Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution.

It looks to measure North America air quality observing air pollution from space more frequently and in greater detail than previous space-based instruments. The satellite’s orbit will allow for hourly daytime observations of pollutants down to a resolution of 4 square miles across an area that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific and from central Canada to Mexico City.

The first-stage booster for this mission was flying for the fourth time, and the company once again recovered it on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas in the Atlantic Ocean.

This was the 18th launch from the Space Coast in 2023 with all but one coming from SpaceX, which was the 3D-printed Relativity Space Terran 1 rocket last month. Including launches from California, this was SpaceX’s 23rd launch.

SpaceX has a Falcon Heavy launch, the sixth ever and second this year, on tap from Kennedy Space Center as well this month targeting no earlier than April 18 at 7:36 p.m., according to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex launch calendar.

Bigger news, though, may be the impending launch attempt of the new Starship and Super Heavy rocket from SpaceX’s facility in Boca Chica, Texas.

CEO Elon Musk posted video to his Twitter account early Thursday of the two massive pieces of rocketry stacked on the launch pad, stating, “Starship preparing for launch.”

What was stacked Starship 24, as in the 24th prototype of the spacecraft, sitting atop the Super Heavy 7 booster.

In March, Musk had indicated the third week in April might be the target. SpaceX later posted, “Starship fully stacked at Starbase. Team is working towards a launch rehearsal next week followed by Starship’s first integrated flight test [about a] week later pending regulatory approval.”

The company still awaits the OK from the FAA to proceed with the effort to send Starship on a suborbital trip to space to circle 3/4ths of the Earth and attempt a landing near Hawaii.

If it launches, the 33 Raptor 2 engines on the Super Heavy booster could combine to produce more than 17 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, which would make it the most powerful rocket ever nearly doubling the thrust of NASA’s Space Launch System that set the record for a rocket reaching orbit last November during the Artemis I mission.

During a hot fire test in February, SpaceX was able to successfully ignite 31 of the 33 engines on the launch pad.

Starship 24 has six Raptor 2 engines itself. The test flight looks to have it separate from Super Heavy 7 over the Gulf of Mexico., continue on an orbit around the Earth and land back in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.

Earlier launch plans for the test called for SpaceX to attempt a landing of the Super Heavy 7 booster in the Gulf on a barge, but some media outlets have reported the booster will instead simply crash into the Gulf.

The success of the Starship program is essential to NASA’s plans to return humans to the lunar surface by 2025. SpaceX was awarded the Human Landing System contract for both the Artemis III and IV missions.

For Artemis III, which looks to bring the first woman to the moon, she and one other astronaut will leave the Orion spacecraft while orbiting the moon after climbing aboard a docked version of Starship, which will then bring them down to a location on the moon’s south pole.

It would be the first time humans returned to the moon since Apollo 17 landed more than 50 years ago in 1972.

While the test flights of Starship are slated from Texas, work continues for it to launch from KSC’s Launch Complex 39-A, where SpaceX’s current stable of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets take off.

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