SpaceX plans to launch its giant Starship vehicle for the second time ever this morning (Nov. 18), and you’ll be able to watch the motion live.
Starship, the largest and strongest rocket ever built, is scheduled to lift off from SpaceX’s Starbase site in South Texas today during a 20-minute window that opens at 8 a.m. EST (1300 GMT; 7 a.m. local Texas time).
You possibly can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX, or directly via the corporate. Coverage is anticipated to begin at around 7:25 a.m. EDT (1225 GMT).
SpaceX is developing Starship to get people and cargo to the moon and Mars, in addition to perform quite a lot of spaceflight duties closer to home. NASA picked Starship to be the primary crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program, and the vehicle has several private moon missions on its docket as well.
The nearly 400-foot-tall (122 meters) vehicle consists of two elements, each of that are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable — a first-stage booster called Super Heavy and 165-foot-tall (50 meters) upper stage often called Starship.
The duo has flown together just once thus far, on a test flight that lifted off from Starbase on April 20. The mission aimed to send the upper stage partway around Earth, ending with a splashdown within the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii. But Starship’s two stages did not separate as planned, and SpaceX intentionally destroyed the vehicle high over the Gulf of Mexico.
Saturday’s test flight will likely be a reprise of the April mission, attempting to perform what that debut jaunt couldn’t.
If all goes in keeping with plan, Super Heavy will splash down within the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after launch. Starship, meanwhile, will head east out over the ocean, attain something near orbital velocity and are available down within the Pacific near Hawaii about 90 minutes after liftoff.
Saturday’s launch was originally alleged to occur on Friday (Nov. 17), but SpaceX delayed things by a day to swap out one in all Super Heavy’s grid fins. These waffle-iron-shaped structures help the booster steer its way back to Earth after launch.