Are we about to see the first-ever Starship booster reuse?

SpaceX has mounted a familiar Super Heavy booster on the launch pad at Starbase, Texas, and it is indicating that we’re not far away from seeing the first Starship booster first stage reuse. The rocket in this discussion is Booster 14, it was used during Flight 7 and successfully recovered after participating in the test.

SpaceX has designed the Starship integrated flight to take heavy payloads into orbit and reuse the hardware with the next mission, just like the Falcon 9. Unlike its Falcon sibling, both Starship stages can be reused due to its sophisticated design and technological improvements.

The booster is packed with 33 Raptor engines, generating more than 16 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. It takes off the mission and sends the second stage to orbit. After hot-staging, the booster returns to the landing zone and gets caught by the catch tower chopsticks.

Source – SpaceX

The company attempted the first-ever booster catch during Flight Test 5, and it succeeded. The same maneuver attempted with Flight 6, but the booster was splashed down in the Gulf of America.

Earlier this year, SpaceX launched the seventh flight test with a flight-proven hardware. Specifically, this new booster reused one Raptor engine from Flight 5’s booster. Interestingly, the booster performed quite well during the flight and performed a perfect landing burn to land between tower chopsticks.

That said, SpaceX has already verified one of the Super Heavy’s flight proven hardware with Flight 7, and it opens possibilities to do the same with all of the Raptor engines involved in the prior test.

For now, the booster 14 is mounted on the launch pad but waiting for any testing, still we don’t know when SpaceX will actually reuse this first stage with a Starship.