SpaceX shoehorns Canaveral launch in before Thursday’s retry of powerful Starship

Elon Musk’s prediction that SpaceX would shoot for a “4/20? mission for the massive Starship rocket is coming to fruition, but before Thursday’s retry to launch what would be the most powerful rocket to ever lift off from Earth, SpaceX had some business to attend to from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

A Falcon 9 lifted off from Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40 at 10:31 a.m. Wednesday on a mission to send 21 of its next-generation Starlink satellites to orbit. It’s the 19th launch from the Space Coast this year with 18 of the 19 coming from SpaceX.

The first-stage booster was making its eighth flight with yet another recovery on the drone ship called A Shortfall of Gravitas in the Atlantic Ocean.

It’s the 186th time the company has recovered a booster as part of its cost-saving reusability program since the first successful landing in December 2015.

For the year, SpaceX has now flown 17 Falcon 9 missions and one Falcon Heavy mission from either Canaveral or neighboring Kennedy Space Center. It has also flown seven times from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California for a total of 25 missions of what could be as many as 100 launches for the company in 2023.

That total, which would break 2022’s record of 61 orbital missions, could include the impending test launch of the Starship and Super Heavy that only received the OK to fly from SpaceX’s launch facility Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, last Friday. The company geared up for the first attempt to get the combination of the booster and spacecraft off the launch pad on Monday, but a pressure issue and stuck valve forced a scrub.

SpaceX announced it would try again on Thursday, which happens to be 4/20 on the calendar, one of Musk’s favorite references to drop on his Twitter account as it’s also a reference to 4:20, the time of day people often associate with smoking marijuana.

“Perhaps inevitable,” Musk wrote on Twitter after SpaceX updated the target launch date and time.

Liftoff for Starship is planned for a 62-minute window that opens at 9:28 a.m. EDT.

Standing at 395 feet tall, the next-generation rocket features a first-stage booster with 33 Raptor engines capable of producing more than 17 million pounds of thrust, which nearly doubles the power of last November’s launch of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket on the Artemis I mission, the current record holder for most powerful rocket to ever make it to space.

The Starship spacecraft atop the booster has six of its own Raptor engines, and this test flight aims to send Starship into space, but only on a suborbital flight that doesn’t circle the Earth entirely and has Starship making a hard water landing near Hawaii. The booster also aims for a hard water landing after separation over the Gulf of Mexico after liftoff.

The launch system design, though, is designed so that eventually, the Super Heavy booster would return to the 469-foot-tall launch integration tower often referred to as “Mechazilla,” with a vertical landing captured with the aid of two pivoting metal arms called the “chopsticks.” The Starship spacecraft would make a vertical landing at its destination as well, which would make the combination the first fully reusable rocket in the industry.

So far SpaceX has only flown short altitude flights of Starship. This is the first time SpaceX will send a stacked version for a test launch, and is slated to be one of many before it will begin commercial operations. Dozens if not more than 100 of those will be needed as well before SpaceX lets humans on board, but it has at least three commercial human spaceflight missions already lined up as well as being awarded the NASA contract to land the next humans to walk on the moon.

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