Elon Musk's giant, multi-billion-dollar mega rocket is set to take off again from Texas this evening on another test flight.
A one-hour launch window opens at around 7:30 p.m. EDT tonight. SpaceX will on its website and on X around 30 minutes before the launch.
The scheduled flight comes after failures earlier this year that saw the test vehicles explode high above the Caribbean, scattering debris and forcing aircraft in the region .
The rocket, known as Starship, is the largest ever built. On this flight, its lower stage, known as "Super Heavy," will use 33 powerful engines to lift Starship to the edge of space. Starship will then separate from Super Heavy and ignite its six engines. It will fly around earth for less than an hour, conducting numerous tests, including the launch of several dummy satellites. The spacecraft will then reenter Earth's atmosphere and "land" in the southern Indian Ocean.
Super Heavy, meanwhile, will fly back and land in the Gulf. The landing will be less spectacular than previous test flights, where the booster has been caught by a pair of giant mechanical "chopsticks." SpaceX says it's conducting the landing over water because it wants to test whether the booster can successfully land without one of its three center engines igniting. The engine will be deliberately disabled to see if the booster can compensate using other engines on board.
Starship has completed a similar journey three times before, but it never made it past North America on its last two test flights. Minutes after both launches, it exploded, showering the Caribbean islands of Turks and Caicos with debris and forcing airliners to divert from their flight paths.
Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed! ✨
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)
SpaceX says it now believes the failures were caused by two separate problems with Starship. The first, in January, was caused by "harmonic response several times stronger in flight than had been seen during testing, which led to increased stress on hardware in the propulsion system," according to the company. The second failure in March was caused by a hardware failure above one of the spacecraft's six engines, which resulted in an onboard fire.
"While the failure manifested at a similar point in the flight timeline as Starship's seventh flight test, it is worth noting that the failures are distinctly different," the company said after its investigation of the second incident.
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