On May 28, SpaceX will perform the ninth launch of the Starship superheavy system. We will tell you about the main goals of the upcoming flight and where you can watch its live broadcast.
Work on mistakes
The upcoming flight is significant for SpaceX. The two previous Starship tests in January and March 2025 went through a similar scenario. Shortly after separating from the Super Heavy booster, the spacecraft collapsed, after which its debris entered the atmosphere, setting off fiery fireworks in the sky over the Caribbean Sea. What is more frustrating is that both flights involved a new, larger, and more powerful version of Starship V2. The ship received a ton of upgrades, and its payload capacity was increased to 150 tons. However, due to two accidents in a row, Starship V2 has never managed to demonstrate them yet.
All this has raised legitimate questions about the reliability of the Starship V2 design and the presence of serious flaws in it. SpaceX denies such rumors. According to the official position of the company, despite the external similarity, both accidents occurred for different reasons. The first – due to a fuel leak caused by stronger-than-expected vibrations. The second was due to a hardware malfunction in one of the Raptor’s central engines, which led to the inadvertent mixing of fuel components and their subsequent ignition.
SpaceX claims that during the tests, engineers were able to reproduce the problems encountered during past flights, after which they made the necessary changes in the design, designed to prevent the recurrence of such incidents. We will soon find out how successful the company’s error correction work was.
Reusing Super Heavy
In general terms, the Starship’s ninth flight program resembles the plan of the two previous tests. But there is a significant difference in the form of Super Heavy. During the ninth Starship flight, the company will, for the first time, reuse a booster that has already flown into space. We are talking about the Super Heavy with the flight number B14, which took part in Starship’s seventh mission. After separation, the booster returned to the Starbase spaceport, after which it was successfully picked up by the Mechazilla tower.
In preparation for the new mission, engineers replaced the thermal protection of the B14 booster’s engine compartment. However, most of its original components will make a second flight into space, including 29 of the 33 Raptor engines.
True, there are no plans to return the B14. It will be sunk in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico/Gulf of America. This is because engineers plan to use the gas pedal for many tests to collect data that will help improve the performance and reliability of future Super Heavy.
One of them will be a larger angle of attack during descent, which, in theory, will allow using less fuel for the landing maneuver. Another important test will take place during the final landing phase. Engineers will deliberately shut down one of the three center engines that are normally used for this procedure. This is to gather data on the backup engine’s ability to complete the landing impulse. And during the final landing maneuver, the booster will use only the two center engines. At the same time, they will be shut down while still in the air. So the B14 is waiting for a hard landing with probable destruction.
Starship’s ninth flight plan
As for Starship, it will fly on the same suborbital trajectory and try to accomplish the same goals that were planned to be achieved during the previous tests. One of them will be the deployment of eight mock-ups of Starlink satellites. These will follow the same trajectory as Starship and will disintegrate on re-entry. In addition, it is planned to re-launch one Raptor engine in space and to transmit video and telemetry at high speed using the Starlink system.
The plan for the new Starship test also includes several experiments related to its heat shielding. Thus, a part of the protective tiles was removed from the ship. This is necessary in order to test its vulnerabilities during re-entry. Several different types of metal tiles have also been installed on Starship, including one with active cooling. These will allow testing of alternative materials that could be used to heat shield the ship.
If Starship successfully overcomes the test of the Earth’s atmosphere, it will land in the waters of the Indian Ocean. SpaceX has no plans to tow the Starship and return it to land.
Live broadcast of the Starship launch
The Starship launch will be broadcast live by SpaceX on the X social network (formerly Twitter). The one-hour window for the Starship launch will open on May 28 at 11:30 p.m. GMT (6:30 p.m. EST). The broadcast will begin 40 minutes before the launch.
Watch Starship’s ninth flight test → https://t.co/Gufroc2kUz https://t.co/NYF0ZMyeGp
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 23, 2025
In addition to the official broadcast, various space bloggers and communities will be hosting their own YouTube broadcasts of the Starship flight.
As we have noted before, the upcoming flight is essential for SpaceX. The company needs to overcome Starship’s losing streak. The success of the ninth test will demonstrate that the company’s engineers have indeed done effective work on the mistakes and will open the way for a full-fledged orbital flight of the ship. If everything again ends in an accident, it will only fuel the debate about the correctness of the design decisions made by SpaceX engineers, and will be a very serious blow to both the Artemis program and to Elon Musk’s ambitious plans to land humans on Mars.
