SpaceX plans to launch the eighth test flight of its huge Starship rocket today (March 3), and you can watch the dramatic action live.
Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, is scheduled to lift off from SpaceX‘s Starbase site in South Texas today during a window that opens at 6:30 p.m. EST (2330 GMT; 5:30 p.m. local Texas time).
You can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX, or directly via the company. Coverage will begin about 40 minutes before liftoff.
If all goes according to plan today, Super Heavy will return to Starbase and be caught by the launch tower’s “chopstick” arms about seven minutes after liftoff.
Starship’s upper stage, meanwhile, will deploy four dummy versions of SpaceX’s Starlink broadband satellites on a suborbital trajectory before splashing down in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia about 66 minutes after launch.
Those were also the main goals of Starship Flight 7, which launched on Jan. 16. SpaceX pulled off a Super Heavy chopsticks catch that day, but Ship didn’t fare so well: It suffered a propellant leak and ended up exploding above the Atlantic Ocean before it could deploy its mock Starlink spacecraft. (There were 10 such craft on board Starship on the last flight.)
Related: SpaceX catches Super Heavy booster on Starship Flight 7 test but loses upper stage (video, photos)
SpaceX is developing Starship to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, and to handle the bulk of the company’s other launch tasks as well. NASA has a big stake in the vehicle; the agency picked Starship to be the first crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program, which aims to land astronauts on the moon in the next few years.
The current iteration of Starship stands 403.5 (123 meters) tall, but SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said future versions will be even bigger.
Article by:Source: mwall@space.com (Mike Wall)
