The mighty Starship rocket could take its 12th test flight as early as March, according SpaceX chief Elon Musk.
In a post on X on Monday, Musk shared a photo of the massive rocket in an earlier flight, along with the comment, “Starship launch in 6 weeks.”
The Starship, which comprises the upper-stage Ship spacecraft and first-stage Super Heavy booster, will lift off from Pad 2 at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in southern Texas. It’ll mark the first launch from the new pad, which is still under construction.
More importantly, the mission will mark the first-ever launch of the third version of Starship.
When fully stacked, the new vehicle will be a little taller, increasing from 123.3 meters to 124.4 meters.
The new version also features a larger capacity compared to its predecessor, allowing for heavier payloads, and comes with new docking adapters for in-orbit fuel transfer — a vital upgrade for Starship flights to the moon and beyond.
The Starship generates a colossal 17 million pounds of thrust at launch, making it the most powerful rocket ever to fly. To give that some context, that’s about 10 times the liftoff thrust of its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.
Its awesome power, and spectacular launch and landing, has created huge interest in the rocket since its first flight in 2023. The vehicle could also one day blast the first humans toward Mars.
Before that, the Starship is expected to play a key role in the Artemis III mission, currently set for no earlier than 2027. In the much-anticipated endeavor, a modified Ship spacecraft will land two NASA astronauts on the lunar surface, marking the first crewed moon landing since 1972.
But the Starship is still in the testing phase, and has to clear numerous hurdles before it can take on the complex lunar mission.
The 12th Starship flight, which according to Musk is eyeing March for liftoff, will be an important stepping stone as SpaceX works to get the rocket ready for showtime.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.