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On December 9, 2020, Starship S.N. The sun will shine around the lower fin of 8.
Trevor Mahleman
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Double Starship.
Trevor Mahleman
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The transition to the blue hour in the Golden Hour, as the starship SN8 shuts down after its first attempt at a 12.5km flight.
Trevor Mahleman
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The top close-up of the SN8 featuring front fins and RCS (reaction control system) thrusters, which will reclaim the starship to return to its (hopefully, controlled) bellyflop descent landing pad.
Trevor Mahleman
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Close-up of Starship SN8.
Trevor Mahleman
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At sunrise on December 9, 2020, Starship S.N. 8.
Trevor Mahleman
Original story 12:45 pm EST: SpaceX is reading its Starship prototype vehicle from its South Texas launch site on Wednesday afternoon for a second launch attempt. The launch window extends to local time (UTC: 00 pm), and sources indicated that no liftoff will arrive at 2 pm local time.
The company came very close to launching the “SN8” prototype on Tuesday evening, before the attempt to have only 1.3 seconds left in the countdown was automatically canceled. It’s not clear what the cause of the final-second scrub is – perhaps beyond acceptable levels of pressure or temperature readings – but spaceX engineers seem to have noticed the issue.
The weather at the launch site on the coast remains almost perfect on Wednesday with light winds and clear skies. Even if a technical problem arises again, there are additional opportunities on Thursdays and Fridays. However, the weather in South Texas will be more windy in those days, probably more for the flight.
This will be the first time SpaceX has attempted to fly a starship at an altitude – the vehicle can fly more than 12.5 km. Previous test flights have only reached over 150 meters, and those vehicles do not include the flips, nose cones and other features needed to control the flight of vehicles in a thin environment. Operating this is no small feat, as a large-scale vehicle stands more than 0 meters high and wide.
Because much of this testing will be new to the vehicle and its engineers, the chances of failure are high. Maybe that’s why hundreds of thousands of people drew attention to SpaceX’s short webcast of Tuesday’s launch attempt – there’s a lot of uncertainty about what will happen.
As we await the second attempt today, take a look at the gallery of images captured early Wednesday morning by Trevor Mahalmann, who visited the launch site before being closed to traffic by Boka Chika Boulevard for testing.
Update EST by 3:10 p.m.: The webcast below is unlikely to start five minutes before the launch attempt, which is now expected to take place as early as 3:00 pm local time (21:00 UTC).
SN8 high-altitude flight test.
Listing image by Trevor Mahleman
