SpaceX is ready for the seventh test flight of Starship — the gargantuan rocket that Elon Musk, the company’s founder, says will take people to Mars someday.
Over the first six test flights, SpaceX has demonstrated that it can launch the largest rocket ever into space and more or less bring the pieces back to Earth intact. Over the coming year, the company is looking to turn “more or less” into “reliably” and prove out other capabilities.
Here’s what to know about Thursday’s launch.
When is the launch, and how can I watch it?
The launch is scheduled to occur during a one-hour window beginning at 5 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday from Starbase, SpaceX’s launch site in south Texas. SpaceX will provide coverage on its website beginning about 35 minutes before liftoff.
What is Starship?
The Starship rocket system is the largest ever built — 403 feet tall, or nearly 100 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty including the pedestal.
And it has the most engines ever in a rocket booster: The Super Heavy booster — the bottom part of the rocket — has 33 of SpaceX’s powerful Raptor engines sticking out of its bottom. As those engines lift Starship off the launchpad in South Texas, they will generate 16 million pounds of thrust at full throttle.
The upper part, also called Starship or Ship for short, looks like a shiny rocket from a science fiction movie from the 1950s and is made of stainless steel with large fins. This is the upper stage that will head toward orbit, and ultimately could carry people to the moon or even Mars.
What happened during the last flight?
President-elect Donald J. Trump attended the sixth test flight on Nov. 19, visiting Mr. Musk in the launch control room. The upper Starship flew on a suborbital trajectory halfway around the world, successfully re-entered the atmosphere and performed a landing maneuver, flipping to a vertical position before gently splashing down in the Indian Ocean about an hour after liftoff.
Not unexpectedly, it then tipped over and exploded.
The booster also successfully re-entered the atmosphere. But plans to catch it using mechanical arms on the launch tower — a feat that SpaceX accomplished during the fifth test flight — were called off after sensors on the arms were damaged during launch. The booster was diverted to the Gulf of Mexico.
What’s different about the seventh flight?
For the Starship on this seventh test flight, significant design changes were made to the propulsion, the heat shield and the control systems. The rocket has been stretched several feet taller than earlier Starships — space for bigger tanks that hold 25 percent more propellant. The flaps near the top of Starship are smaller and have been moved toward the tip to reduce damage from the searing temperatures of re-entry.
While in space, Starship will test a new system that somewhat resembles a PEZ candy dispenser. It will shoot out 10 dummy satellites that are similar in size and shape to the next-generation spacecraft that will be deployed for SpaceX’s Starlink internet service. The dummy satellites will follow Starship’s trajectory and burn up in the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean.
While in space, one of the engines will be restarted. The ability to fire the engines multiple times will be needed to nudge a future Starship into a stable orbit around Earth and also provide the shove to fall back to Earth when it is time to return.
SpaceX will attempt another catch of the Super Heavy booster with the mechanical arms at the launch tower.
When will Starship be able to send people to space?
That could still be at least a couple of years away. NASA is planning to use a version of Starship to take astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon during its Artemis III mission, currently scheduled for 2027.
Jared Isaacman, the billionaire founder of the Shift4, a payment services company who has flown twice to space on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets, was to take part on the first crewed flight of Starship. But now that he has been selected by Mr. Trump to be the next administrator of NASA, Mr. Isaacman is likely to stay on the ground, at least for now.
