SpaceX takes another step towards relaunching the Starship

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The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is currently reviewing a mishap investigation report submitted by SpaceX in connection with the test flight of the company's giant 'Starship' rocket, which took place in April, a spokesman for the regulatory agency said Tuesday.

The development is noteworthy because it indicates that SpaceX has comp Phone Number List leted its investigation into the April 20 launch, which ended about four minutes after liftoff following engine failures and other problems during ascent. Now comes the review by the FAA, thus fulfilling the agency's role as a regulatory body charged with ensuring public safety during commercial rocket launch operations.

Ars Technica

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“When a final report on the mishap is approved, corrective actions that SpaceX must take will be identified,” an FAA spokesperson told Ars Technica . “Separately, SpaceX will need to modify its permits to incorporate those actions before being cleared to relaunch [the rocket].”

SpaceX's filing of the incident investigation report was first reported by Payload , a news site focused on the space industry. The content of the document has not been made public and the company has not commented on it.

What will happen with the launch of SpaceX's Starship rocket
As is often the case with SpaceX's Starship program, it's difficult to predict when the company will make another attempt to launch a series of fully integrated Starship rockets, which tower about 400 feet (120 meters) high.

Elon Musk , founder and CEO of SpaceX, stated in mid-June that the company could be ready for another Starship test flight in six to eight weeks . Putting it most gently, that calendar has already expired.



SpaceX has made significant progress repairing and upgrading the Starship launch pad at the company's Starbase facility in south Texas. Those reforms were successfully verified on August 6, during a test firing of the Starship's 'Super Heavy' rocket at the Starbase launch stand.

But the firing test only lasted half the planned five seconds, and several of the Super Heavy's 'Raptor' engines shut down prematurely. Some also failed during the April 20 test flight, raising concerns about the safety of SpaceX's powerful new engine. The company is working on a new version to fix reliability issues.

Ars reported earlier this month that SpaceX engineers collected a lot of data during the burn test regarding the upgraded launch pad, and some of that information was included in the final version of SpaceX's mishap investigation report. The launch pad now features a steel plate for water cooling where a concrete slab was placed beneath the Super Heavy booster during the April flight. The intense propulsion of the Raptor engines tore a massive hole under the launch stand, shooting car-sized chunks of concrete into the surrounding marshes and the Gulf of Mexico.

Residents of communities several kilometers away also reported dust falling from the sky. Some early reports suggested the material may have come from pulverized cement from the launch pad, but later analysis determined it was beach sand kicked up by the rocket.