SpaceX will launch the seventh test flight of its Starship rocket on Thursday as the company looks to further boost development of the giant vehicle, including a crucial test of how it will deploy satellites.
The company has a one-hour window, from 5:00 PM ET to 6:00 PM ET, to launch Starship from its private “Starbase” facility near Brownsville, 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.
There will be no people on board the Starship flight. However, Elon Musk's company is flying ten “Starlink simulators” in the rocket's payload bay and plans to attempt to deploy the satellite-like objects once in space. This is an important test of the rocket's capabilities, as SpaceX needs Starship to deploy its much larger and heavier next generation of Starlink satellites.
Although SpaceX has not specified what the Starlink simulators are made of, mass simulators are commonly used in rocket vehicle development and are often simple structures made of metal or concrete that weigh about the same as the object in question. Because the rocket does not reach orbit, the simulators are expected to follow a similar trajectory to the rocket and are designed to burn up during reentry.
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 about an hour after takeoff.
Additionally, the rocket's “Super Heavy” booster would return after detaching from Starship and land on the arms of the company's launch tower – a feat the company performed on the fifth flight but missed on the sixth.
The Starship rocket is on the launch pad during bad weather on January 14, 2025, near Boca Chica, Texas.
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As with every previous flight, SpaceX plans to further drive development by assessing additional capabilities of the spacecraft, including testing its heat shield tiles and the trajectory of its intense reentry.
Starship is critical to the company's plans, despite its $350 billion valuation and already dominant position in the space industry.
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. SpaceX has conducted six spaceflight tests of the entire Starship rocket system so far since April 2023, at a steadily increasing cadence.
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 in 2022.
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
TOPSHOT – The SpaceX spaceship takes off from the starbase at Boca Chica, Texas, on November 19, 2024, for the Starship Flight 6 test.
Chandan Khanna | Episode | Getty Images
The spaceship flying in this launch, tagged as Ship 33, also represents a second-generation version of the vehicle, dubbed 'Block 2'.
SpaceX noted that the “major upgrades” to this vehicle include changes to the flaps on the nose of the vehicle, redesigns of the propulsion system to improve performance, an improved flight computer, 30 cameras positioned along the vehicle to monitor the rocket monitors and a reinforced heat shield. .
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.