SpaceX confirms first reuse of a Super Heavy booster for flight 9 of Starship. This booster was previously used on flight 7
Static fire of the Super Heavy preparing to launch Starship's ninth flight test. This booster previously launched and returned on Flight 7 and 29 of its 33 Raptor engines are flight proven pic.twitter.com/XBOvoZezvJ
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 3, 2025
Static fire of the Super Heavy preparing to launch Starship's ninth flight test. This booster previously launched and returned on Flight 7 and 29 of its 33 Raptor engines are flight proven pic.twitter.com/XBOvoZezvJ
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 3, 2025
9 Comments
Huge if successful. Best to those working hard on this project.
Hoping this next ship had enough time to prepare better fixes (or mitigations) to be successful on flight 9! I have heard rumors that it will be a lot more struts in the plumbing, hopefully working until they can correct the root cause and reduce that weight from the reinforcements.
Bittersweet, ‘cos it’ll be the first caught and the first reflown, which is amazing, but will be landed in the Gulf — they won’t re-catch it due to the re-entry tests they want to perform.
So it won’t end up being a museum piece.
It will be really interesting when the commercial passenger phase of this mission begins, considering people don’t even want to sit in a Tesla at the moment. I would imagine at this point, if Musk does not relinquish ownership and control, the Starship passenger manifests may end up being a glorified (and vertically mobile) prayer breakfast invitation list.
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Maybe they’ll get that banana to orbit and back.
That’s good, but i hope the ship doesn’t explode. And gets to orbit. And maybe gets back. But still then there’s so much left to do
I did not expect the first booster reflight to happen before the first Starship cargo flight, but here we are.
If this works, they’ll have a turnaround of about 6 months on Starship first stage reusability – even with this early design that’s not optimized for rapid reusability, with engine swaps that had to be carried out. Falcon 9 reusability took a year to get there.
Pulling it off would certainly put more oomph into SpaceX’s iterative development, and make all their Starship ramp up plans a lot less crazy.
This will make the test flights much cheaper! If block 2 keeps blowing up not having to build and fly more and more boosters is such a win.