SpaceX’s upper-stage Starship spacecraft inside a garage at the business’s Starbase center in South Texas. SpaceX published this picture on X on Jan. 8, 2025. (Image credit: SpaceX)
SpaceX’s Starship will fly for the seventh time ever early next week, if all goes according to strategy.
SpaceX revealed today (Jan. 8) that it’s targeting Monday (Jan. 13) for Flight 7 of Starship, the 400-foot-tall (122 meters), totally recyclable megarocket developed to assist mankind settle the moon and Mars.
Starship is set up to take off Monday at 5 p.m. EST (2200 GMT) from Starbase, SpaceX’s production and launch website in South Texas. You’ll have the ability to enjoy the action live; the business will webcast the flight starting about 35 minutes before liftoff.
Starship has actually flown 6 times to date– two times in 2023 and in March, June, October and November of in 2015.
Related: SpaceX’s Starship Flight 7 test flight will release simulated Starlink satellites for 1st time
The October objective included an extraordinary catch of Starship’s Super Heavy booster by Starbase’s launch tower, a task that SpaceX will attempt to duplicate on Flight 7. (That was the intend on Flight 6 in November also, however an interaction concern with the tower scuttled a catch effort on that objective.)
Starship’s 165-foot-tall (50 m) upper phase, called Starship or merely Ship, will boil down for a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean on Monday, as it did on its 3 newest launches.
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SpaceX will try to break some brand-new ground on the upcoming objective. For the very first time ever, Ship will try to release payloads in area– 10 mock satellites, “comparable in size and weight to next-generation Starlink satellites as the very first workout of a satellite deploy objective,” SpaceX composed in a Flight 7 objective description. (Starlink is SpaceX’s broadband megaconstellation in low Earth orbit. The business is relying on Starship to end up developing the big network, which might ultimately include more than 40,000 spacecraft.)
“The Starlink simulators will be on the very same suborbital trajectory as Starship, with splashdown targeted in the Indian Ocean,” SpaceX included.
Super Heavy will likewise sport recycled hardware for the very first time on Flight 7– “a Raptor engine from the booster introduced and returned on Starship’s 5th flight test,” according to the objective description.
Monday’s Starship launch will belong to a hectic and interesting spaceflight stretch, if all goes to strategy. The launching launch of Blue Origin’s effective New Glenn rocket is arranged for early Friday early morning (Jan. 10), for instance, and a SpaceX Falcon 9 is slated to send out a set of personal moon landers skyward in the wee hours of Jan. 15.
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