SpaceX Almost Ready For Second Starship Launch, Integrates Vehicle

On Tuesday September 5th at 2:20pm, SpaceX integrated Starship 25 on top Super Heavy Booster 9 at the orbital launch pad in Starbase, Texas. This pairing forms the vehicle that will perform the second integrated flight test of Starship, after the first test in April.

Booster 9 has successfuly completed its second static fire test, after the first test was aborted due to too many engines shutting down, and has had a hot staging ring installed, which SpaceX hopes will make the stage separation process much simpler than the previous approach of flipping the two vehicles apart.

Ship 25 has also completed its individual vehicle testing, and has now had its lift points removed and covered with TPS tiles, as well as its livery being added.

With the two vehicles successfully integrated, all that's left to do is destack the ship again momentarily to arm its Flight Termination System (which has been upgraded since the previous test) then re-stack it atop booster 9. It had been assumed that SpaceX would perform a fuelling test of the integrated stack, however Elon Musk has posted on X that Starship is now ready for launch, so it seems like these tests are no longer necessary 

Now it's a matter of waiting for the FAA to publish its mishap investigtion report and issue SpaceX a launch licence. This should hopefully be completed soon, and we can see Starship take to the skies once again in the coming weeks.