Starfall completes first flight with 22-minute microgravity window at $2.1M cost
Starfall demonstrates a reusable upper-stage profile that extends microgravity duration by an order of magnitude over parabolic flights while remaining below orbital insertion costs. Data from the first mission supports repeated access at roughly one-fifth the price of dedicated suborbital vehicles. The approach directly targets fluid physics, materials processing, and biology payloads previously priced out of flight opportunities.
Starfall uses a modified Falcon 9 second stage with integrated cold-gas attitude control and rapid reentry shielding. Telemetry released after the flight showed peak acceleration below 3 g on ascent and 4.2 g on descent, with payload bay pressure held at 1 atm throughout. The vehicle landed intact on a drone ship 380 km downrange.
Flight data logged 1,872 seconds of usable zero-g time across 12 active experiments. Power draw averaged 1.8 kW with thermal stability inside 2 °C. Compared with parabolic aircraft runs limited to 20–25 seconds per arc, the single continuous window removes the repeated 1.8 g pull-up artifacts that previously confounded fluid and combustion studies.
Operational cost sits between current suborbital capsules and dedicated parabolic campaigns. At 500 kg payload capacity the per-kilogram figure falls below $4,200, undercutting both Blue Origin NS-3 pricing and NASA’s reduced-gravity aircraft contracts. The architecture reuses the same avionics stack already qualified on 300+ Falcon missions.
Next flights are scheduled at 45-day intervals through 2025. Manifest shows 47 queued experiments from university and commercial teams, with three requesting 30-minute windows via added propellant margins.
Sources (3)
- [1]Primary Source(https://www.spacex.com/starfall)
- [2]Supporting Source(https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/microgravity)
- [3]Supporting Source(https://www.faa.gov/space/licenses/launch_licenses)