SpaceX’s Starship megarocket will be launched into orbit for the first time on September 28: watch it live
Look on it
SpaceX’s Starship megarocket will attempt to orbit for the first time Monday morning (September 28), and you can watch the historic action live.
Spacecraft should be launched from EspaceXGoogle’s Starbase site in South Texas on Monday during a 75-minute window that opens at 8:15 a.m. EDT (12:15 p.m. GMT; 7:15 a.m. Texas local time).
You can watch it in the window above, courtesy of SpaceX. Coverage will begin approximately 30 minutes before takeoff.
Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, reaching a towering height of 407 feet (124 meters) when fully stacked. Its two stages – the Super Heavy booster and the upper stage ship Ship – are designed to be fully and quickly reusable, an advancement that SpaceX called “Holy Grail of rocketry.“
The company believes that Starship will open the skies like never before, allowing humanity to settle down. the moon And Marchand perhaps venture even further. But the rocket is not yet ready for such world-changing work; it is still in the flight test phase.
Spacecraft debuted in April 2023 and now has 13 missions to its credit, all suborbital. That’s expected to change on Monday, however, when the giant vehicle launches for the 14th time.
Flight 14 will send the 171-foot-tall (52 m) ship into Earth orbit, where it will deploy 26 of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink version 3 internet satellites. These will be the first members of a new megaconstellation in low earth orbit (LEO), which Elon Musk said that it would ultimately consist of 100,000 spaceships. (SpaceX currently operates approximately 11,000 Starlink satellites in LEO).
The ship will circle our planet six times, then return home for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Chile, almost 10 hours after launch. This will be quite different from Starship’s suborbital flights, which lasted a maximum of 65 minutes and targeted the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Western Australia.
Super Heavy won’t stay up that long; it is expected to crash into the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after takeoff, as in previous flights.
During operational flights, SpaceX plans to return the Super Heavy and Ship to the launch pad, where they will be grabbed by the tower’s “wand” arms. The company has already done this three times with Super Heavy but hasn’t tried it yet with Ship.
This box will be checked on another flight. And Starship will have other obstacles to overcome as well, even if today’s flight goes perfectly. For example, each spacecraft mission beyond Earth’s orbit will require multiple rendezvous with “tanker” vessels to refuel the traveling spacecraft. SpaceX has not yet demonstrated propellant transfer off-Earth, so we will undoubtedly see this step in an upcoming test flight.
The ship will also need to be equipped with a life support system before crewed missions, which could arrive relatively soon. For example, NASA chose Ship as the first crewed lunar lander for its project. Artemis Programwhich aims to land humans on the Moon for the first time in 2028 on the Mission Artemis IV.
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