SpaceX will make the second attempt on Thursday morning’s first test flight of Starship – the gleaming silver mega rocket that could one day carry humans Mars and beyond.
You can follow the whole thing in the live stream below. Based on previous attempts, it’s probably action-packed!
This is the second test flight attempt – the first attempt on Monday was turned into a wet dress rehearsal about 10 minutes before takeoff due to pressurization issues.
The team fixed these issues during the week and has now recycled the fuel from the first launch attempt and is ready to try again.
musk has tweeted that the SpaceX team learned a lot from the frozen pressure valve.
All systems are currently green for launch https://t.co/VxZOEAD652
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 20, 2023
The second test flight attempt is scheduled for Thursday, April 20 at 8:28 a.m. Texas time (CT) or 1:28 p.m. UTC and the launch window will remain open for 62 minutes.
The live stream below begins approximately 45 minutes before launch, so is scheduled for 7:45am CT and 12:45pm UTC at this time.
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Starship is an incredible 40 stories high. It consists of the spacecraft — a 50-meter (164-foot) long reusable crew and cargo pod — stacked atop a 70-meter (230-foot) tall super-heavy rocket booster.
A successful test firing of the 33 Raptor engines on the booster was conducted in February, but the Super Heavy Booster was anchored the entire time.
SpaceX only received permission from the Federal Aviation Administration last Friday to actually launch Starship in its full configuration.
This first launch is simply about getting into Earth orbit. SpaceX will not attempt to land or reuse Starship or the Super Heavy Booster.
But even getting to take off will be a huge victory.
Musk has previously given the rocket only a 50 percent chance of getting into orbit on its first test flight.
“I’m not saying it’s going into orbit” Musk said at the Morgan Stanley conference on March 7, “but I guarantee excitement!”
But he gave 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 people to other planets and back again.
Of course, Falcon 9 took many, many failed attemptsand a whole lot landing pad explosionsbefore it could repeatedly take off and land successfully.
Now the rocket is regularly used to 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 has been successful first started in November.
The space agency’s goal is to have astronauts in lunar orbit by November 2024.
Starship will be more powerful than SLS and also reusable. The goal of SpaceX consists of launching a spaceship into orbit and then refueling it with another spaceship so it can fly on to other planets.
“Full rapid reusability…is the profound breakthrough needed to extend life beyond Earth”, Musk said in an interview with the Morgan Stanley Conference. “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 has been adapted from ScienceAlert previous reporting of SpaceX test flight trials.
