SpaceX will make the second attempt of Starship’s first test flight on Thursday morning – the shiny silver mega rocket that could one day take humans to Mars and beyond.
You can watch the whole thing as it happens at the livestream below. Based on previous attempts, it’s likely to be action packed!
This is the second test flight attempt – the first try on Monday was turned into a wet dress rehearsal around 10 minutes before liftoff due to pressurization issues.
The team has been troubleshooting those issues during the week and have now recycled the fuel from the initial launch attempt, and is ready to try again.
Musk has tweeted that the SpaceX team learned a lot from the frozen pressurant valve.
All systems currently green for launch https://t.co/VxZOEaD652
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 20, 2023
The second test flight attempt is scheduled for 8:28 am Texas time (CT), or 13:28 UTC on Thursday, 20 April, and the launch window will stay open for 62 minutes.
The livestream below will start approximately 45 minutes before launch, so at this point is scheduled for 7:45 am CT and 12:45 UTC.
Starship is an incredible 40 stories tall. It consists of the spacecraft – a 50-meter (164-foot) reusable crew and cargo capsule – stacked on top of a 70-meter (230-foot) tall Super Heavy rocket booster.
A successful test firing of the 33 Raptor engines on the booster was carried out in February, but the Super Heavy booster was anchored down the whole time.
SpaceX only got permission last Friday from the Federal Aviation Administration to actually launch Starship in its full configuration.
For this first launch, the aim is simply to get into Earth’s orbit. SpaceX won’t attempt to land or reuse Starship or the Super Heavy Booster.
But even getting to liftoff will be a huge victory.
Musk has previously given the rocket only a 50 percent chance of succeeding in getting to orbit in its first test flight.
“I’m not saying it will get to orbit,” Musk said at the Morgan Stanley Conference on March 7, “but I am guaranteeing excitement!”
But he did give the rocket an 80 percent chance of successfully reaching orbit by the end of the year.
The ultimate goal is for Starship to become a reusable rocket just like Falcon 9, one that can take humans to other planets and back again.
Of course, Falcon 9 took many, many failed attempts, and a whole lot of landing pad explosions, before it could successfully take off and land over and over again.
Now the rocket is used to regularly transport people and objects to and from the International Space Station.
NASA is also working on its own Mars heavy rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS) which was successfully launched for the first time in November.
The space agency’s goal is to take astronauts to lunar orbit by November 2024.
Starship will be more powerful than SLS, and also reusable. SpaceX’s goal is to put a Starship into orbit and then refuel it with another Starship, so it can continue onto other planets.
“Full rapid reusability … is the profound breakthrough that is needed to extend life beyond Earth,” Musk said in the Morgan Stanley Conference interview. “It lowers the cost of access to space by orders of magnitude.”
“This vehicle could make life multiplanetary. That’s a really big deal.”
Some of the above content was taken and adapted from ScienceAlert’s previous coverage of SpaceX’s test flight attempts.
