After Back-to-Back Flops, SpaceX Says Starship’s 9th Test Flight Is a Go SpaceX has been making major progress with Starship’s 232-foot-tall (71-meter) Super Heavy booster, catching the booster during three out of four attempts thus far. The same can’t be said for the rocket’s upper stage, however, which suffered glitches during the last two test flights. During Flight 7 in January, Starship’s upper stage suffered an engine problem that forced an early shutdown, causing it to break apart and rain down bits of rocket debris over Turks and Caicos in the Caribbean. Less than two months later, during Flight 8, the upper stage suffered another major failure, spinning uncontrollably before breaking apart a few moments after launch. Both times, the upper stage was supposed to make a soft splashdown off the coast of Western Australia about an hour after liftoff. The failure prompted an investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which conducted a safety review of the rocket. Last week, the FAA gave SpaceX the green light to launch Starship for its ninth test flight. SpaceX also reported that it had identified the problem and made “several hardware changes,” ahead of Tuesday’s liftoff, according to a statement. The company said that one of the rocket’s engines failed to fire during the boostback burn, which was likely due to overheating of the engine’s ignition device. SpaceX added insulation to Starship’s engines this time around, hoping that it won’t run into the same issue again. During Tuesday’s flight, Super Heavy “will fly a variety of experiments aimed at generating data to improve performance and reliability on future boosters,” SpaceX wrote. The rocket will also re-attempt objectives that it failed to meet during the last two test flights, including the deployment of payloads and “multiple reentry experiments geared towards returning the vehicle to the launch site for catch,” according to SpaceX. SpaceX’s Starship is a key part of NASA’s planned return to the Moon as part of the agency’s Artemis program, which aims to land astronauts on the lunar surface in 2027. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is also betting on the company’s Starship rocket for his plan to land humans on Mars. Ahead of Tuesday’s launch, Musk will hold a company talk titled, “The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary,” which will be live streamed on X at 1 p.m. ET.