— SpaceX delays second Starship test launch to Nov. 18 to replace rocket part When Musk first introduced the Starship concept, he called it the Mars Colonial Transporter. When fleshing out details of the system at the International Astronautical Congress in September 2016, he announced a new name: the Interplanetary Transport System. As these former monikers show, the new spacecraft is designed to help make humanity an interplanetary species — a long-held dream of Musk's. Though the timeline seems to continually shift from year to year, the billionaire entrepreneur envisions Starship as the vehicle that will allow humanity to establish a sustainable, permanent presence off Earth. The breakthrough that could make that happen is Starship's reusability. The new system stands as the evolutionary next step beyond SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, which now regularly launches with previously flown boosters. However, only the Falcon 9's first stage and payload fairings are reusable — and reuse usually takes a few weeks at a minimum. The Falcon 9's second stage is not reusable and is disposed of after each flight. Starship, on the other hand, is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. The rocket's launch tower features two massive "chopstick" arms designed to catch Super Heavy as it returns to the launch pad for landing, and also to stack a landed Starship back onto Super Heavy for reflight. Starship's launch today was hoped to lead to an uptick in launch cadence for new vehicle, as further refined designs make their way to the launch pad at Starbase. Currently, Starship's test iterations don't include any of the cabin or life-support components needed to carry a payload or sustain a crew, but SpaceX is betting big on the rocket's success. However, SpaceX will now have to investigate the causes of today's Starship disassembly, and take measures to prevent the same thing from happening again in the future. Infrastructure to support Starship launches from NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida have been underway for the past couple years, and SpaceX plans to utilize their facilities at KSC once Starship is flying regularly. A Starship launch tower has been built at Launch Complex-39A (LC-39A) at KSC, and a crew access arm added to the tower at LC-41 to support Falcon 9 crew launches from multiple pads once Starship launches move to the Cape. Moving forward, SpaceX may aim to fly Starship test missions as often as once a month, which, if maintained, would go a long way toward certifying the vehicle for crewed launches in time for Artemis 3. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket has launched more than once a week, on average, the past few years, and reaching a higher cadence for the company's new launch vehicle has always been the goal. As Starship has evolved through its development stages, Musk has touted the vehicle's capabilities for rapid reusability, and hopes to see the same vehicles launching, landing, and relaunching multiple times a day, eventually amounting to possibly hundreds of Starship launches every week. Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com. See all comments (34)