SpaceX is set to launch the 11th full-scale test flight of the company's Starship rocket Monday evening, with hopes of capping a tumultuous year with a successful one-hour voyage from South Texas to the Indian Ocean.
Liftoff of the Super Heavy booster with the Starship upper stage is scheduled for 6:15 pm CDT (7:15 pm EDT; 23:15 UTC). SpaceX has a 75-minute window to launch Monday. You can watch a livestream of the flight here.
SpaceX's control team, positioned a couple of miles away from the launch pad at Starbase, Texas, will oversee the loading of more than 10.5 million pounds of super-cold methane and liquid oxygen into the two-stage rocket beginning about an hour before liftoff. In the final minutes of the countdown, the world's largest rocket will undergo a steering check, and the launch director will give a final "go" for launch.
The booster's 33 Raptor engines will ignite to push the massive stainless-steel rocket skyward with approximately 16.7 million pounds of thrust, 60 percent more power than the Soviet N1, the second-largest rocket in history. This is the second time SpaceX will use a previously flown Super Heavy booster. This particular booster launched and landed on a Starship test flight in March.
What’s different?
Much of this flight will seem familiar to anyone who watched the previous Starship mission in August. The 403-foot-tall (123-meter) rocket will follow an arcing trajectory over the Gulf of Mexico before shedding its Super Heavy booster a little more than two-and-a-half minutes into the flight. A split-second before staging, the six engines on the Starship upper stage will fire to continue the push into space.
On the descent back to Earth, the booster stage will test a new landing burn engine configuration SpaceX plans to use on the next version of the rocket. The new sequence will use 13 of the booster's 33 engines, then downshift to five engines before running just the three center engines for the final phase of the burn. This "13-5-3" sequence will make the rocket more resilient against an engine failure, SpaceX said. Previously, the booster transitioned directly from 13 engines to three engines.