SpaceX has turned heads and tested boundaries with each test flight of Starship, the most powerful rocket system ever constructed. And the latest mission of the nearly 400-foot-tall (121-meter) vehicle is designed to push the envelope even further in a quest to return astronauts to the moon and someday fulfill CEO Elon Musk’s dream of sending the first humans to Mars.
NASA has agreed to pay SpaceX nearly $3 billion to develop Starship, which is slated to serve as a lunar lander ferrying humans to the moon’s surface as soon as 2027.
The imminent flight will test an upgrade of Starship that aims to improve the vehicle’s capabilities — and ability to survive the trip home from space — as well as carry out an experimental maneuver designed to test how satellites might deploy from this “new generation” of the spaceship.
Liftoff is on track for no earlier than 5 p.m. ET (4 p.m. local time) Wednesday from SpaceX’s launchpad at its Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas. The window for launch will remain open for one hour. The company will livestream the event on its website and X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that Musk purchased in 2022.
The Super Heavy rocket booster, the vehicle’s bottommost portion known as the first stage, gives the initial thrust after takeoff. The booster will fire its 33 Raptor engines for about 2 ½ minutes to propel the attached uncrewed Starship vehicle away from the launchpad toward space.
For the first time, one of those 33 Raptor engines will have been to space before: SpaceX said it is reusing an engine recovered from the Super Heavy booster flown during the company’s fifth test flight in October.