“Less than a month has passed since the historic fifth flight of SpaceX’s Starship, during which the company caught the booster with mechanical arms back at the launch pad in Texas. Now, another test flight could come as soon as Nov. 18, the company announced Wednesday.

The improbable but successful recovery of the Starship first stage with ‘chopsticks’ last month, and the on-target splashdown of the Starship upper stage halfway around the world, allowed SpaceX to avoid an anomaly investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration. Thus, the company was able to press ahead on a sixth test flight if it flew a similar profile.

And that’s what SpaceX plans to do, albeit with some notable additions to the flight plan…

The Starship upper stage will also fly the same suborbital trajectory it successfully followed in October, however it will incorporate an in-flight relight of one of the rocket’s six engines. As Ars explained in a feature last week, this is the next milestone on the development path for Starship and is critical to allowing orbital missions of Starship to make a controlled reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.

Successfully demonstrating the capacity to re-relight Raptors in space enables SpaceX to begin flying commercial missions with Starship and likely opens the way for Starlink launches, possibly as early as the first half of next year. These larger Starlink satellites can only fit within Starship’s capacious payload and will provide direct-to-cell Internet capability.”

From Ars Technica.