While SpaceX has not concluded its investigation of the loss of Flight Test 8's Starship, and hasn't nailed down a date for FT-9, they have announced that FT-9 will feature the first reuse of a previously flown SuperHeavy booster.
The most visible sign of SpaceX making headway with Starship's first stage—called Super Heavy—came at 9:40 am local time (10:40 am EDT; 14:40 UTC) Thursday at the company's Starbase launch site in South Texas. With an unmistakable blast of orange exhaust, SpaceX fired up a Super Heavy booster that has already flown to the edge of space. The burn lasted approximately eight seconds.
This was the first time SpaceX has test-fired a "flight-proven" Super Heavy booster, and it paves the way for this particular rocket—designated Booster 14—to fly again soon. SpaceX confirmed a reflight of Booster 14, which previously launched and returned to Earth in January, will happen on next Starship launch With Thursday's static fire test, Booster 14 appears to be closer to flight readiness than any of the boosters in SpaceX's factory, which is a short distance from the launch site.
SpaceX says 29 of the 33 Raptor engines on Booster 14 will be flight proven, so while not exactly their goal of "no-touch reuse" it's a giant leap in that direction. At liftoff, SuperHeavy is the most powerful rocket ever built with nearly twice the thrust of the Saturn V that got people to the moon - 16.7 million pounds of thrust. Without the Starship, Booster 14 itself is 232 feet tall.
Reuse has come to be accepted as the way things should be, and that shouldn't be a surprise. Nobody would seriously talk about flying a commercial airliner once and throwing it away. Spacecraft may fly with smaller safety margins than a car or commercial airliner; that is, the difference between forces the rocket is calculated to be able to survive, and those that it will be exposed to during a real flight, but that's because of the brutality of the mission. In the car or the Airbus, the extra weight of stronger designs is much less of a burden to live with than with a rocket.
The first time SpaceX reused a Falcon 9 for a paying customer, it was practically a year after the initial flight and many inspections and tests to ensure everything still behaved as it should. That mission was in 2017. They now have over 425 flights of reused boosters. Reusing B14 is the best way to verify that they knew what they're looking for as they inspected and retested it.
SpaceX hasn't released a date for the next flight of B14 with its new Starship, but it's still early in the buildup to FT-9 and more likely to be in May than April. The ship assigned to FT-9 is still in its factory at Starbase. There have been no test firings of the ship, so it will need to roll out to a test stand for its own static firing tests. Once that's accomplished, they typically move the ship back to the factory for more work, inspections and finishing touches, before returning it to the pad.
Booster 14 during Flight Test 7, January 16, 2025. Image credit: SpaceX