SpaceX receives launch approval from the FAA for Starship Flight 4

The FAA has approved Starship to launch once again, but this time it seems to have been written to give SpaceX the ability to launch again without another FAA investigation (if there’s a failure somewhere). The company is now making final preparations for launch on Thursday, June 6.

Tuesday afternoon, the FAA announced it modified SpaceX’s existing launch license for its Starship launch vehicle for another launch post safety and mishap investigations by the agency and the company.

This clears the red-tape ahead of SpaceX’s planned Thursday launch of Ship 29 and Booster 11 vehicles. The approval might also clear investigations by the FAA in the future with the license wording suggesting no review needed if a similar failure occurs.

Starship Flight 4 will have a group of key mission objectives, many similar than Flight 3. First, another successful ascent will provide more valuable data and prove Flight 3’s ascent wasn’t a fluke. Second, and extremely important for Starship’s, and even NASA’s, development timeline, will be splashing the Ship into the ocean at the end of flight.

Without this, SpaceX cannot move forward with bigger and longer test flights.

On Flight 3, most of these took place without issue. The rocket lifted off with the Booster placing the Ship into its correct flight trajectory. However, three things didn’t go right on the mission: opening the payload door didn’t look like it was successful, issues with attitude control mean the propellent transfer test didn’t get completed, and the Ship did not survive reentry.

So, going into Thursday, if any of these three objectives don’t succeed again, I would personally look at this mission as a failure. NASA really needs SpaceX to move forward with Starship development. While there are a lot of things with Artemis that will cause the first landing to be delayed, the HLS program was a big risk for NASA that it needs to get right.

Streams from local outlets will start up in the very wee hours of Thursday morning. SpaceX’s official stream will pop up much closer to launch. However, it seems like Boeing’s Starliner will have its first crewed mission out shined by Starship’s repeat mission.