SpaceX launching Starship Flight 7 on Jan. 16: Watch it live

Posted on 18/01/2025

Watch live! SpaceX to launch Starship megarocket on Flight 7 test mission – YouTube

SpaceX is set to launch the seventh test flight of its Starship megarocket on Thursday (Jan. 16), and you can watch the action live.

The 400-foot-tall (122 meters) Starship is scheduled to lift off from SpaceX’s Starbase site in South Texas Thursday at 5 p.m. EST (2200 GMT; 4 p.m. local Texas time).

You can watch the action live here at Space.com courtesy of SpaceX, or directly via the company. Coverage will begin about 35 minutes before launch.

a large silver rocket rolls vertically down a road at night — The upper stage of SpaceX’s Starship megarocket rolls out to the launch pad at the company’s Starbase site on Jan. 9, 2025 ahead of a planned Jan. 15 test flight. (Image credit: Elon Musk via X)

Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. It consists of two stages, both of which are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable: a giant booster called Super Heavy and a 165-foot-tall (50 meters) spacecraft known as Starship, or simply Ship.

Starship has flown six times to date — twice in 2023 and in March, June, October and November of last year. October’s mission featured an unprecedented catch of Super Heavy by the launch tower’s “chopstick” arms — a feat SpaceX wants to repeat on today’s flight.

But the company plans to do something new on Flight 7 as well: If all goes according to plan, Ship will deploy 10 mock versions of SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites. These dummy spacecraft won’t stay in space for long; they’ll follow Ship’s trajectory, splashing down in the Indian Ocean about an hour after liftoff. (SpaceX eventually plans to catch Ship with the chopstick arms but will not try to do so on Flight 7.)

Today’s flight will likely be the first of many for Starship in 2025; SpaceX plans to make serious progress on the megarocket in the coming weeks and months.

“This new year will be transformational for Starship, with the goal of bringing reuse of the entire system online and flying increasingly ambitious missions as we iterate towards being able to send humans and cargo to Earth orbit, the moon and Mars,” SpaceX wrote in a Flight 7 mission preview.

Editor’s note: This story was updated on Jan. 15 to reflect the latest launch date from SpaceX.

Article by:Source – mwall@space.com (Mike Wall)