Starship Flight 6: Ship 31 moves out to the launch site, banana for scale

SpaceX has moved out its 31st Starship upper stage to the launch site ahead of Flight 6, expected on November 18. This ship has seen a few changes compared to what came before it but is only the tip of the iceberg for what is to come next.

SpaceX is gearing up for its next launch of its Starship rocket next Monday. The latest movement closer to that mission was Ship 31 being moved out to the launch site Monday night.

Ship 31 is like all previous launch-ready Starship upper stages that have come before it, except for a few changes. One big change was the removal of some heat shield tiles on the side of the vehicle. This was noted in a SpaceX blog post about making the ship compatible with being caught by the launch tower.

SpaceX is hoping to be able to catch its first ship early next year at the earliest. Catching the ship will be the final part in making Starship truly a fully reusable spacecraft. For Flight 6, SpaceX will once again ditch the ship into the Indian Ocean, although this time it will be during the day.

Those splashdowns have become pretty accurate over the last few missions. Flight 5’s splashdown was perfectly lined up with SpaceX’s buoy that it placed out in the landing zone. With a successful catch, and hopefully a few more in future missions, making a catch with the tower’s arms shouldn’t be too big of a leap for SpaceX.

Final V1 Starship

Ship 31 is the last of its kind in the world of Starships. Elon Musk announced about a year ago that the company would be making a few block upgrades to the Starship rocket in the future. Well, those block updates are coming here soon, with Flight 7 slated to be the first V2 Starship launch.

V2 Starship’s upper stage will see stretched propellant tanks and a reduced payload size. While the overall height of Starship will increase slightly, it will not be enough to compensate for the increased propellant tanks.

This is not because SpaceX sees the need for a smaller payload bay, but an iterative step in getting to V3, which will see the payload bay stretched back out to accommodate the large payloads needed to get to Mars.

The booster will also see some changes, mostly just stretched tanks to have more propellant for its Raptor 3 engines to burn. And of course, there will be an abundance of changes inside the rocket we’ll never see or hear about for improved reliability, reusability, and efficiency.

Flight 6, however it may end, will be the end of an era for SpaceX and Starship. The vehicle is no longer an early test product but a likely proven launch vehicle that will see a deep change in the commercial launch mantra.