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SpaceX will conduct a third test flight of its Starship rocket on Thursday as the company looks to push the giant vehicle's development past new milestones.
Elon Musk's company has a window of nearly two hours, from 8 a.m. ET to 9:50 a.m. ET, to launch Starship from its Starbase facility near Boca Chica, Texas. If SpaceX is unable to launch within that window for weather or technical reasons, the company will postpone the attempt until a later date.
The company said in an update Thursday morning that the weather was “70% favorable” for the launch. It most recently targeted 9:25 a.m. ET for launch.
SpaceX has conducted two tests of the full Starship rocket system in the past year, with launches in April and November. Both previous launches had progressive but explosive results: While each of the rockets flew for a few minutes, with the most recent reaching space, both vehicles were ultimately destroyed due to problems.
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The Federal Aviation Administration cleared SpaceX on Wednesday for a third launch attempt.
Assuming the launch goes as planned, Starship would reach space and then circumnavigate half the Earth before re-entering the atmosphere and crashing into the Indian Ocean.
The Starship system is designed to be completely reusable and aims to become a new method of flying cargo and people beyond Earth. The rocket is also crucial to NASA's plan to return astronauts to the moon. SpaceX has won a multibillion-dollar contract from the agency to use Starship as a crewed lunar lander as part of NASA's Artemis moon program.
SpaceX is placing a strong emphasis on an approach that builds on “what we've learned from previous flights” in its approach to developing Starship. The company says its strategy focuses on “recursive improvement” of the rocket, with even test flights with fiery results representing progress toward its goal: a fully reusable rocket that could take humans to the moon and Mars.
Musk said last year that he expected the company to spend about $2 billion on spaceship development by 2023.
The staggering size of the spaceship
SpaceX's next-generation Starship spacecraft atop its powerful Super Heavy rocket launches from the company's Boca Chica launch pad on an unmanned test flight, near Brownsville, Texas, on November 18, 2023.
Joe Schipper | Reuters
Starship is both the tallest and most powerful rocket ever launched. Fully stacked on the Super Heavy booster, the Starship is 120 meters high and has a diameter of approximately 9 meters.
The Super Heavy booster, which is 70 meters high, marks the start of the rocket's journey to space. At its base are 33 Raptor engines, which together produce 16.7 million pounds of thrust – about double the 8.8 million pounds of thrust of NASA's Space Launch System rocket, which first launched late last year.
The spaceship itself, which is 50 meters tall, has six Raptor engines: three for use in Earth's atmosphere and three for use in the vacuum of space.
The rocket is powered by liquid oxygen and liquid methane. The entire system requires more than 10 million pounds of propellant for launch.
Goals for the third flight
There will be no humans on board in this attempt to reach space with Starship. Company leadership has previously emphasized that SpaceX expects to fly hundreds of Starship missions before launching the rocket with any crew.
SpaceX will aim to surpass the nearly eight-minute flight of the second launch and achieve further milestones. SpaceX and the FAA conducted an investigation into the launch problems in November, and as a result the company made changes to the monster rocket before the third attempt.
The company outlined several new capabilities it plans to demonstrate during this flight. These include opening and closing the spacecraft's door once in space – which would be how the rocket would deploy payloads such as satellites on future missions – and transferring fuel during flight in a NASA demonstration, as well as re-igniting Starship's engines while in space. .