Small Space News Story Roundup 36

SpaceX Stacks Flight Test 4 Starship 

On Wednesday, May 15, SpaceX Starbase stacked the next Flight Test; Starship 29 and Booster 11, on Boca Chica's Orbital Launch Mount and began testing the combination for Flight Test 4. 

Starship stacking is a dramatic and impressive sight. There's a striking juxtaposition of mechanical and natural beauty, for example, as a gleaming silver rocket rises amid shrub-studded seaside dunes. And that 400-foot-tall (122 meters) rocket is bigger and more powerful than any other launch vehicle humanity has ever built.

The stacking follows earlier testing performed separately with Flight 4's Super Heavy and Ship. SpaceX has already ignited the Raptor engines of both vehicles on the launch mount, in common and brief prelaunch trials known as static fires.

Time-lapse, 20 second long video on X here.

Screen capture from that SpaceX video. Image credit SpaceX. 

So Wen Launch? (as the 'net followers say) 

There's no date set and they still have to wait for a launch permit from the FAA. I've heard that will be after Memorial Day (Monday the 27th) before the FAA will grant the license meaning the launch could possibly be before June 1, but "3 to 5 weeks" (from now) is being widely quoted.  Just like it was being quoted around a month ago.

Starliner Slips Again

To reuse the headline from Tuesday, Starliner Slips Another Four Days. I guess the simple "helium leak" is either proving to be too much for the ground crews or the people that said it was a simple helium leak got something wrong. That four day delay was from the original scheduled launch date, today, May 17, to Tuesday the 21st. The latest bump moves it out to Saturday, May 25. As the position of their target, the ISS, moves across the sky the launch time moves earlier. The launch today was to have been 6:16 PM (Eastern - it's Cape Canaveral). Saturday's launch time will be 3:09 PM.

"The additional time allows teams to further assess a small helium leak in the Boeing Starliner spacecraft's service module traced to a flange on a single reaction control system thruster," agency officials wrote in an update today.

NASA also said:

Further analysis of the leak suggests that it's not a huge problem, but NASA, Boeing and ULA want more time to assess the situation, agency officials wrote in today's update.

Something about saying it's no big deal followed by "we want another four days to check that" strikes me as mixed messages. Maybe it's yet another sign of being a graybeard, but sometimes saying Use As Is can be the scariest thing they tell you.