With president-elect Donald Trump and SpaceX CEO/newly minted efficiency czar Elon Musk As expected, SpaceX will launch the world’s most powerful rocket today on its sixth test flight: a groundbreaking sub-orbital launch of a massive Super Heavy Starship to evaluate critical upgrades.
What time will the SpaceX Starship launch take place?
Launching the 30-foot-wide, 300-foot-tall rocket from Musk’s sprawling Boca Chica, TexasThe production and testing facility on the Gulf Coast near Brownsville is scheduled to open at 5 p.m. EST, the opening of a 30-minute launch window.
Just like with the rocket fifth test flight last monthTuesday’s flight’s primary objectives remained the same: propel the spacecraft out of the lower atmosphere on a sub-orbital flight to re-emerge over the Indian Ocean, while the Super Heavy booster flies itself back to the launch pad where giant mechanical arms will launch it pluck from the air.
The Super Heavy-Starship rocket during pre-flight testing at SpaceX’s production facility in Boca Chica, Texas, on the Gulf Coast. /Credit: SpaceX
Will Trump attend the SpaceX Starship launch?
Trump planned to fly to South Texas to witness the launch, sources familiar with the plans told CBS News. Trump mentioned the new rocket in a campaign speech on September 21 in Wilmington, North Carolina, urging Musk to “get those rocket ships going because we want to get to Mars before the end of my term. We want to do it.”
What’s different about launch 6 than the previous 5 launches?
This time, one of the spacecraft’s methane-burning Raptor engines will be restarted in space to demonstrate the propulsion system’s ability to perform critical maneuvers and future de-orbit burns.
Engineers are also testing “a series of heat shield experiments and maneuver changes for ship reentry and descent over the Indian Ocean,” SpaceX said on its web page, along with software and booster hardware upgrades intended to add additional propulsion system redundancy and improve the to increase the missile’s structural capacity. force.
The test flight in October was the first with a successful “catch” from the launch pad and the first with a spacecraft reaching the Indian Ocean essentially intact.
For Tuesday’s flight, the launch was moved to late afternoon in Texas to allow for a daylight landing for video documentation.
Plans for the Super Heavy Starship
The Super Heavy-Starship is the centerpiece of Musk’s drive to develop a fully reusable heavy-lift rocket, which he says is the key to making humanity “multi-planetary.” And now, with Trump’s support, he may be able to jump-start that effort.
Shortly after winning the presidential election, Trump announced that Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy would head a new agency known as the Department of Government Efficiency. The goal, Trump said in a statement, is “to dismantle government bureaucracy, reduce excess regulation, reduce wasteful spending and restructure federal agencies.”
Musk said in the same statement: “This will send shockwaves through the system, and through everyone involved in government waste, which is a lot of people.”
SpaceX already has billions in its possession government contracts and builds a variant of the spaceship that will serve as an initial lunar lander at NASA Artemis moon program. It remains to be seen how Musk’s role in the new administration might advance SpaceX’s plans or how questions about conflicts of interest might be resolved.
Politics aside, “we’re looking at a serious attempt to return to the moon, and perhaps a serious attempt… to send, if not humans, to Mars in the next four years, a lot of things and a lot of infrastructure that will do that.” enable people to go to Mars,” said Casey Drier, director of space policy at the Planetary Society.
“Maybe not in four years, but maybe in ten years.”
The key to those plans is the Super Heavy-Starship.
How does the Super Heavy Starship work?
The Super Heavy booster is powered by 33 Raptor engines that burn liquid methane and oxygen to generate more than 16 million pounds of thrust at full throttle, more than twice the takeoff power of NASA’s legendary Saturn 5 moon rocket. The spaceship is powered by six Raptors and can carry astronauts, satellites and scientific probes.
Like the company’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, the 70-meter-tall first stage is designed to be completely reusable and fly itself back to the launch pad, where giant ‘chopsticks’ on the platform can catch the booster as it descends allows for quick maintenance, refueling and launching.
Unlike the Falcon 9, which uses a disposable second stage, the 50-meter-tall spacecraft is also reusable and can safely return to Earth after launching satellites or transporting astronauts to the moon and eventually, Musk says, to Mars.
SpaceX already transports astronauts and cosmonauts to and from the International Space Station using Falcon 9s with the Crew Dragon spacecraft and is building a variant of the Starship for NASA to return astronauts to the moon’s surface in the period 2026-2027.
The company also launches commercial and military satellites, builds a powerful space tug for NASA to safely propel the International Space Station from orbit when the program retires in 2030, and launches thousands of its own Starlink satellites to provide global access to space . internet.
“SpaceX functionally has a monopoly on access to space,” says Drier. “Virtually any item you want to launch into space, whether you’re the U.S. government or a commercial provider, a satellite company, even the European Space Agency, they all use SpaceX rockets.”
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