On Sunday, SpaceX will make a historic attempt to catch the returning Starship booster

The spacecraft is prepared to fly again — and for the first time, SpaceX will try to bring the booster back to the launch site to catch it with a pair of huge “sticks.”

SpaceX will launch the giant Starship on Sunday in a launch window that opens at 5 a.m. PST (7 a.m. local time) from the company’s Starbase in southeast Texas. The flight, the fifth in the spacecraft development program, will come a little sooner than expected: The Federal Aviation Administration has previously said it doesn’t anticipate issuing a modified launch license for this test before the end of November.

This timeline deeply offended SpaceX, prompting the company to repeatedly highlight what it described as regulatory inefficiencies. However, the world’s strongest launcher will take to the skies sooner than expected, and on Saturday the FAA announced it had approved tomorrow’s launch.

“The FAA has determined that SpaceX has met all safety, environmental and other licensing requirements for the suborbital test flight,” the regulator said in a statement. It’s value noting that the authorization also includes approval for an additional test flight, on condition that “the changes requested by SpaceX for Flight 6 are within the scope of what has been previously analyzed,” the FAA said.

The nearly 400-meter-long spacecraft is at the center of SpaceX’s stated ambitions to make life multi-planetary, but more directly concerns NASA’s ambitious Artemis campaign to return humans to the lunar surface. SpaceX anticipates quickly reusing the entire Starship, which incorporates the upper stage (also called the Starship) and super-heavy booster, but meaning demonstrating the ability to get better each stages and quickly refurbish them for future flights.

Therefore, it is sensible that the primary goals of the fifth flight test are two-fold: attempting to “catch” the super-heavy booster at the launch site for the first time in history, and re-entry the spacecraft to its goal and splash down in the Indian Ocean.

The latter goal has already been achieved: SpaceX performed a controlled reentry and splashdown of the spacecraft’s upper stage during its last test mission in June. But the booster clip, as the company put it in a blog post, can be “uniquely innovative” in rocket history.

The closest analogue currently is the routine landings of Falcon 9 rockets on autonomous barges and ground landing zones. However, the plan is that in the case of tomorrow’s launch, the booster will decelerate to a hover and gently position itself in the zone of two “stick” arms attached to the launch tower. These arms would then close around the booster and hold it in place when its motors stopped working.

– SpaceX noted in an update posted on its website that for a catch attempt to occur, “thousands” of criteria should be met, indicating that the systems in the vehicle and on the pad are functional. If these conditions are met, the mission flight director will manually command the booster before completing a trajectory adjustment maneuver, called the afterburner burn, roughly 3 minutes and 40 seconds after liftoff.

“If this command is not sent before the booster burn is completed, or if automatic health checks indicate unacceptable conditions for the Superheavy or tower, the booster will default to a trajectory that will cause it to burn out on landing and make a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico,” the company said.

The entire booster startup and return should take just 7 minutes. Once detached, Starship will proceed to ascend into orbit before descending into the Indian Ocean about an hour after liftoff.

While waiting for the launch license, SpaceX engineers have been very busy: in recent months, they conducted quite a few tests on the launch tower, completely replaced the rocket’s entire thermal protection system with newer boards and a spare ablative layer, and updated the re-entry vehicle’s software. This week, engineers accomplished tests of propellant loading and tests of the launcher flooding system, which is designed to protect the launcher from the powerful fire of the 33 Raptor engines positioned on the launch pad.

The company plans to eventually move Starship’s upper stage back to the landing site as well, though we’ll have to wait to see that in future test launches.

“When each flight builds on the lessons learned from the previous flight, testing hardware and performance improvements across all aspects of Starship, we are on the cusp of demonstrating techniques critical to a Starship design that allows for full and rapid reusability,” the company says. “By continuing to use our equipment in the aerospace environment, and doing so as safely and frequently as possible, we will quickly bring Starship online and revolutionize humanity’s ability to access space.”

Watch the live test webcast starting roughly half-hour before launch (7:00 a.m. PST). SpaceX website Or on X