By Steve Gorman and Steve Nesius
STARBASE, Texas, May 19 (Reuters) - SpaceX is poised this week to conduct the 12th uncrewed test flight of its next-generation Starship rocket, the first of a newly upgraded vehicle seen as critical to Elon Musk's efforts to satisfy investors and push deeper into space.
The debut flight of the Starship V3, outfitted with new features designed to support future missions to the moon and Mars, poses a key test for both the vehicle itself and investor confidence ahead of an initial
public offering for SpaceX expected next month.
The fully reusable rocket ship is crucial to Musk's goals of dramatically cutting launch costs, expanding his Starlink satellite business and pursuing ambitions ranging from orbital data centers to human interplanetary missions - all of which are baked into the company's targeted $1.75 trillion initial public offering valuation.
“For an IPO that is leaning so heavily into narrative and symbolism, we believe this flight is the single most important pre-IPO catalyst remaining on SpaceX’s calendar,” PitchBook senior research analyst Franco Granda said.
The towering spacecraft, consisting of the upper-stage Starship astronaut vessel stacked atop its Super Heavy booster rocket, was due for launch as early as 5:30 p.m. CDT on Wednesday (2230 GMT) from the SpaceX facilities in Starbase, Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico.
In addition to being the inaugural voyage of both the V3 Starship and Super Heavy, test flight 12 will mark the first blastoff from a new launch pad designed for the more powerful rocket.
"EXCITING LANDING"
One of the principal upgrades to the booster rocket is a revamping of its 33 Raptor engines to produce greater thrust from a design that weighs significantly less.
The propulsion system of the upper-stage Starship likewise has been refined for long-duration missions, with mechanisms to allow for ship-to-ship docking, refueling in space and increased maneuverability.
A key measure of success for future test outings will be post-flight recovery of Starship and the Super Heavy booster, which are being developed as reusable vehicles.
SpaceX said it would not attempt to safely land or retrieve either portion of the spacecraft from this launch. But test objectives include execution of several return-flight maneuvers by the booster and Starship itself, including controlled landing burns before each vehicle splashes down at sea.
The Super Heavy is expected to come down in the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after blastoff. Starship's "exciting landing," as SpaceX refers to it, is anticipated about an hour later in the Indian Ocean.
Before that landing, plans call for Starship's payload to release a clutch of 20 Starlink simulators, plus two actual satellites modified to scan the spacecraft's heat shield and transmit data to operators on the ground during re-entry.
INVESTORS WATCHING CLOSELY
SpaceX's engineering culture, considered more risk-tolerant than many of the aerospace industry's more established companies, is built on a flight-testing strategy that pushes newly developed spacecraft to the point of failure, then fine-tunes improvements through frequent repetition.
It remains to be seen how investors weighing SpaceX's forthcoming IPO will reconcile Musk's appetite for short-term risk-taking with his longer-term aspirations for lunar and interplanetary space travel.
Musk, who founded his California-based rocket company in 2002, said one year ago that he foresaw Starship making its first uncrewed voyage to Mars at the end of 2026.
A successful test flight would help reinforce SpaceX's case that Starship, the world’s largest and most powerful rocket ever flown, is nearing commercial readiness after years of explosive setbacks and development delays.
Multiple Starship tankers would be needed to fill one Starship with enough fuel for a moon landing under SpaceX's proposed moonshot plan.
That is part of a $3 billion-plus contract SpaceX won in 2021 under NASA's Artemis program, the U.S. effort to return astronauts to the surface of the moon later this decade for the first time since 1972 at the end of the Apollo era. Those plans put Starship at the center of a new space race with China, which aims for a crewed lunar landing of its own in 2030.
(Reporting by Steve Nesius in Starbase, Texas, and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Additional reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Joe Brock and Christian Schmollinger)
