On its surface, the flight plan for SpaceX's next Starship flight looks a lot like the last one.
The rocket's Super Heavy booster will again splash down in the Gulf of Mexico just offshore from SpaceX's launch site in South Texas. And Starship, the rocket's upper stage, will fly on a suborbital arc before reentering the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean for a water landing northwest of Australia.
SpaceX will again test the rocket's satellite deployer and reignite one of the ship's Raptor engines in space to adjust the vehicle's path for reentry. These demonstrations will pave the way for future Starship flights into low-Earth orbit. All of the rocket's ascents to date have, by design, ended before reaching orbital velocity.
All of this went well on the previous Starship test flight on August 26, when SpaceX rebounded from four consecutive failures—three in flight and one on the ground. With the next Starship launch, scheduled for no earlier than October 13, SpaceX officials hope to show they can repeat the successes of last month's mission.
This will be the 11th full-scale test flight of Starship, and the fifth of this year. It will also be the last Starship test flight until at least early 2026, when SpaceX will debut a larger upgraded vehicle known as Starship Version 3.
Same but different
There are, however, some changes to SpaceX's flight plan for the next Starship. Most of these changes will occur during the ship's reentry, when the vehicle's heat shield is exposed to temperatures of up to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius). Like on the last Starship flight, SpaceX has removed some of the ship's thousands of ceramic thermal protection tiles to "intentionally stress-test vulnerable areas across the vehicle."
Several of the missing tiles are in areas where tiles are bonded directly to Starship's stainless steel structure, without a backup ablative layer, according to SpaceX.