It’s time for Starship to take flight again, with the aim of crashing into the Indian Ocean on the way back from its fourth launch to demonstrate the rocket’s reusability.
Update: June 6, 7:16 am ET: There seems to be some delay this morning. As NSF reports on its live feed, Starship will launch no earlier than 8:49 a.m. ET while ground teams continue to prepare the rocket.
Original article follows.
SpaceX is targeting Thursday, June 6, for the fourth test flight of a new Starship prototype. The mega rocket will lift off during a 120-minute launch period beginning at 8 a.m. ET from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas, according to SpaceX.
The launch will be streamed live on the SpaceX website and via the company’s account on X. The livestream will begin at 7:30 AM ET. A number of third party providers have live streams available, which you can find below.
The company received the launch license from the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Tuesday, allowing it to launch the 122-meter-high mega rocket for the fourth time.
Starship’s first two flights, conducted on April 20 and November 18 last year, did not go exactly as planned, with the rocket exploding over the Gulf of Mexico each time.
The last time the rocket took to the skies was on March 14, and Starship reached a number of important milestones for its third flight. The rocket performed a successful phase separation, a complete burn of the second stage engines, a demonstration of internal propellant transfer for NASA, and a test of the Starlink dispenser door. The mission lasted one hour and 49 minutes before the upper stage disintegrated during reentry.
For Starship’s fourth fully integrated test flight, SpaceX is shifting focus from launching the rocket to orbit to being able to return both stages to Earth. The main objectives of the test flight include performing a landing and soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico with the Super Heavy booster, as well as achieving a controlled reentry of the Starship.
“The main goal of this mission is to reach much deeper into the atmosphere during reentry, ideally through maximum heating,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on X.
Much depends on SpaceX’s continued development of Starship so that it is capable of landing humans on the moon as part of NASA’s planned Artemis 3 mission, currently scheduled for September 2026. The company is pushing its mega rocket to the extreme. flight, and we expect Starship to put on another show on its fourth mission.
Want to know more about Elon Musk’s space venture? See our full coverage of SpaceX’s Starship megarocket and the SpaceX Starlink internet satellite megaconstellation. And for more space flights in your life, follow us X and bookmark Gizmodo’s dedicated Spaceflight page.
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