SpaceX aims for early June launch from Starbase at Boca Chica

May 22—Following a successful "wet dress rehearsal" of Starship-Super Heavy on Monday at Boca Chica/Starbase, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote in a social media statement that the fourth orbital flight attempt would happen soon.

"Starship Flight 4 in about 2 weeks," he wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

A wet dress rehearsal involves stacking the Starship atop the Super Heavy booster, filling each with more than 10 million pounds of liquid oxygen and liquid methane propellant, then counting down just up to the moment of launch before defueling.

SpaceX still needs an updated launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration, which is still conducting a mishap investigation into the third Starship orbital flight attempt, on March 14. The most successful attempt so far, Starship S28 reached orbital velocity but disintegrated during reentry rather than making a planned hard splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

"Primary goal is getting through max reentry heating," Musk wrote on social media. He added that it's "worth noting that nobody has ever succeeded in creating a fully reusable heat shield." Musk noted that the Space Shuttle's heat shield required more than six months of "rework" after a flight.

SpaceX is designing its Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster to be fully reusable in order to drive down the extremely high cost of spaceflight. Part of that is preventing Starship from burning up upon reentry.

Meanwhile, Starship S29 and Super Heavy B11 have been "de-stacked" at the Boca Chica launchpad while SpaceX waits for the green light from the FAA.

Cameron County on its website has posted a closure notice for Boca Chica Beach and S.H. 4 leading to SpaceX for June 1 for "flight testing activities," with backup dates of June 2-3. The closure period is from 12 a.m. to 2 p.m. all three days.

Appearing at a Harlingen Economic Development Corporation event on May 14, Starbase General Manager Kathy Lueders said the FAA was expected to issue the updated license soon, and that SpaceX would be ready to launch immediately.

"We're hoping to have the license by the end of May (or) early June time frame," she said. "The first day we get that license, we're going to fly."

SpaceX has a $2.9 billion contract with NASA to develop Starship as the Human Landing System that will carry U.S. astronauts back to the moon for the first time in more than half a century under NASA's Artemis program. The company has requested a waiver from the FAA to conduct up to nine launches a year from Boca Chica/Starbase, rather than the five launches per year SpaceX is currently approved for.

Kevin Coleman, FAA administrator for Commercial Space Transportation, told reporters in February that "we've been talking to SpaceX constantly around the clock, coming together and trying to figure out how do we do this."