A few hours ago, Elon Musk’s astronautics company SpaceX announced a new schedule for its 8th Starship launch and landing-catch test (IFT-8).
SpaceX will now attempt to launch Flight 8 Starship no-earlier-than (NET) Thursday, 6th March. This is the 3rd time SpaceX had to change the Flight 8 date due to unexpected weather-related and technical hurdles.
SpaceX attempted the 8th Starship launch on 3rd March, but at the last minute — at T-40 seconds, technical issues with both the 1st and 2nd stage prevented the liftoff.
Later on, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk took to X (Twitter) to explain why Flight 8 was scrubbed. SpaceX first scheduled the Flight 8 launch for today but just hours ago changed its decision again and is now targeting tomorrow for the flight test.
Related update: SpaceX lost Flight 8 Starship, live-stream and updates archive
On its official website, SpaceX updated the new Starship Flight 8 test schedule as follows:
The eighth flight test of Starship is preparing to launch as soon as Thursday, March 6. The launch window will open at 5:30 p.m. CT.
In our first Flight 8 update, we reported that SpaceX has backup launch windows until 6th March. However, since this is the new NET date now, SpaceX must have set up backup windows in case of a flight delay for any reason.
Elon Musk said that the Flight 8 Starship would be destacked to inspect the issues it faced just seconds before liftoff on Monday. SpaceX not utilizing today’s launch window is a sign that the SpaceX engineering staff is not 100% confident in launching it today.
As of this writing, the stacking of the Flight 8 Starship is in progress. The hot-staging ring has been installed on the Super Heavy booster and the Starship upper stage is close to being mounted on it.
SpaceX defined the goals, objectives of the Flight 8 Starship launch on its official web page as follows:
After completing the investigation into the loss of Starship early on its seventh flight test, several hardware and operational changes have been made to increase reliability of the upper stage. You can read the full summary of the mishap investigation here.
The upcoming flight will fly the same suborbital trajectory as previous missions and will target objectives not reached on the previous test, including Starship’s first payload deployment and multiple reentry experiments geared towards returning the upper stage to the launch site for catch. The flight also includes the launch, return, and catch of the Super Heavy booster.
Stay tuned as we bring you the latest Flight 8 Starship launch and landing-catch news, videos, and live coverage tomorrow.
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