SpaceX engineers are putting in rigorous efforts to achieve a crucial milestone before the year’s end: sending the Starship prototype to orbit from their Starbase facility situated at Boca Chica Beach, Texas. The eagerly anticipated launch of the stainless-steel prototypes, Starship SN25 & Super Heavy Booster 9, hinges on the acquisition of a spaceflight license from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Today, SpaceX announced it aims to perform the second fully-integrated Starship flight test in mid-November. During the upcoming orbital flight attempt, Super Heavy will lift off from SpaceX’s Starbase facility at Boca Chica Beach, Texas, and travel into an altitude of at least 100 kilometers (km). The booster will separate from the spacecraft after about 2 minutes and 41 seconds into flight to land in the Gulf of Mexico ocean. The spacecraft will continue on its trajectory to fly halfway around Earth and perform a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean about 100 km off the coast of Kauai, Hawaii. If it makes it to orbit the entire flight test is expected to last around 1 hour and 30 minutes. 

The goal of this test is to demonstrate the capabilities of Starship’s two-stage design and to gather data on its performance in flight in order to speed up the rocket-ship’s development.

“Starship’s first flight test provided numerous lessons learned that directly contributed to several upgrades to both the vehicle and ground infrastructure to improve the probability of success on future flights. The second flight test will debut a hot-stage separation system and a new electronic Thrust Vector Control (TVC) system for Super Heavy Raptor engines, in addition to reinforcements to the pad foundation and a water-cooled steel flame deflector, among many other enhancements,” the company shared. 

A major upgrade on SpaceX’s Starship: the installation of a “hot staging” ring on the Super Heavy booster. This crucial addition, also referred to as the “vented interstage,” involves igniting the Starship’s Raptor engines while some of the Super Heavy booster engines are still firing as it propels to orbit, allowing for a seamless transition during stage separation.

SpaceX is also hoping to test the Starship’s heat shield, which will protect it from the heat of reentering Earth’s atmosphere when it returns from orbit with a “belly-flop” landing maneuver to perform an ocean landing.

SpaceX founder Chief Engineer Elon Musk has said he expects a 60% probability of success for the upcoming flight, a significant increase from the first attempt. The increased confidence stems from a “tremendous number” of overhauls made to the spacecraft, with “well over a thousand changes” implemented since the last flight test. “I think the probability [of] this next flight working, getting to orbit, is much higher than the last one. Maybe it’s like 60%,” he said in June during an 𝕏-Spaces discussion. 

The main goal for the 2nd flight is separation between Starship & Super Heavy. Musk emphasized that the success of stage separation plays a crucial role in determining the flight’s outcome.

“[…] There’s a meaningful payload-to-orbit advantage with hot staging, that is conservatively about a 10 percent improvement if you basically just never stop thrusting. […] In order to do this, you actually have to have vents, the super hot plasma from the upper-stage engines has got to go somewhere […]. So we’re adding an extension to [the] booster that is almost all vents, essentially. So that allows the upper-engine plume to go through the vented extension of the booster and not just blow itself up. So this is the most risky thing, I think, for the next flight,” Musk explains.