Max Q - SpaceX gears up for another Starship launch and landing

NASA’s getting ready to do a debut drone flight on Mars — the first ever, in fact, and SpaceX is getting ready to do some more high-flying gymnastics with its prototype spaceship. It hasn’t been the busiest week in space tech, but there’s plenty happening on the horizon, and some signs of more exciting stuff yet to come.

NASA is really ready for private space stations

NASA has been talking about private sector space stations to replace the existing International Space Station for multiple years – and multiple administrations. The agency really, really wants it to happen, and it’s been taking steps to add encouragement. Just a little while ago, it effectively double the price of hosting private company experiments and payloads aboard the ISS, which is one way to suggest that some commercial come along and offer something more price-competitive.

Then last week, it announced a new Commercial Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Development program under its Space Act Agreement, which will end up awarding two to four contracts valued at between $300 and $400 million to start work on identifying customers for LEO services, as well as destinations for the platforms to eventually serve them.

It’s not like there’s been no interest from the private sector: Axiom Space has already made clear that it wants to build its own private space station, and it partnered with the ISS on the first commercial module for the station. Jeff Bezos, too, has articulated a vision for space that includes plenty of space-based living and working quarters, but with increasing support from NASA and an aging space station whose operational life is supposed to end in 2024, that sci-fi future could come sooner than expected.

SpaceX's megaconstellation gets more mega

It would hardly be a Max Q these days if there wasn’t at least one Starlink launch to talk about. One happened last week, with 60 satellites delivered on March 24 in the early hours of the morning from Florida. That means in the last month, SpaceX has added 240 satellites to its constellation – which is more spacecraft than are even operated by the next-largest satellite operator in total. All of that happened between March 4 and March 24, too, so it didn’t even stretch the definition of ‘within a month.’

The company is also gearing up for its next Starship prototype test flight, again coming very soon on the heels of its most recent try. That one went up on March 3, and did everything it was supposed to do pretty much exactly as it was supposed to – with the exception of being totally destroyed in a massive explosion just about 10 minutes after touching down.

This puts big expectations on the flight of the prototype that should happen sometime this week. It’s the 11th in this series of Starship full-scale prototypes, and should happen as early as Tuesday, after a Monday try couldn’t happen because a required FAA inspector couldn’t make it out in time, seemingly to Elon’s disappointment.

NASA's Mars helicopter is getting ready to fly

NASA wants to be the first to perform powered flight from the surface of Mars, and this space-age Wright Bros. moment should happen as early as April 8, the administration said last week. NASA’s Perseverance rover has been going through the steps needed to get the small rotor craft in the air, including dropping a protective covering, finding an airfield and running checks. This will definitely be a moment to watch, just like the original landing of Perseverance was to begin with.

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