SpaceX has pushed the date of the Starship Flight 7 launch two days ahead. This is the second time that Elon Musk’s astronautics and spaceflight company has rescheduled the 7th integrated flight test of Starship (IFT-7).
According to the official announcement by SpaceX, now the Starship Flight 7 test will be conducted on Wednesday, 15th January instead of Monday the 13th Jan. Launch window opens at 2200 UTC.
The announcement came 24 hours after the flight rehearsal test conducted on Friday. This test is also called a
wet dress rehearsal because the ship and the rocket booster are filled with actual propellant used for flight that is Methane + Liquid Oxygen (MethaLOX) in the case of SpaceX Starship.
“Now targeting Wednesday, January 15 for the seventh flight test of Starship,” SpaceX announced the delay on its official X timeline. The delay announcement come after the final major test which is the wet dress rehearsal.
After this final test, SpaceX not only pushed the launch test two days ahead, Starship was also destacked. SpaceX unmounted Ship 33 from Booster 14. It is possible that the SpaceX engineering teams found out some issues during the wet dress rehearsal and they need a couple of days to fix them.
At first, everyone thought that the destacking of
Flight 7 Starship was done for the installation of the flight termination system (FTS) but this does not seem to be the only reason. We might observe another wet dress rehearsal before Wednesday if SpaceX engineers are not satisfied that the ship meets the flight requirements.