SpaceX rolls Starship out to pad ahead of Flight 7 test launch (photos) – Space.com
Starship is scheduled to fly on Monday afternoon (Jan. 13).
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SpaceX is gearing up for the next test flight of its Starship megarocket, which is just a few days away.The company rolled Starship’s 165-foot-tall (50-meter-tall) upper stage — known as Starship, or simply “Ship” — out to the launch pad at its Starbase site in South Texas this morning (Jan. 9).SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk announced the milestone in a post on X. That update featured four photos of the move, which occurred during predawn hours.Starship is scheduled to launch from Starbase on Monday (Jan. 13) at 5:00 p.m. EST (2200 GMT). It will be the seventh test flight for the giant rocket, which SpaceX is developing to help humanity settle Mars and achieve a variety of other exploration feats.Related: SpaceX’s Starship Flight 7 test flight will deploy simulated Starlink satellites for 1st timeBoth of Starship’s stages — Ship and the huge first-stage booster, known as “Super Heavy” — are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. SpaceX plans to showcase a key part of that reuse strategy during Flight 7, landing Super Heavy back at Starbase’s launch tower, which will catch the booster with its “chopstick” arms.SpaceX made such a catch on Starship’s Flight 5 this past October. It aimed to repeat the feat on Flight 6 a month later, but a communication problem with the tower scuttled that attempt.Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more!Ship, meanwhile, will splash down in the Indian Ocean about an hour after liftoff, as it did on both of those prior missions. But the upper stage will do something new on Flight 7, deploying 10 mock satellites — inactive versions of SpaceX’s Starlink broadband craft — which will follow Ship’s suborbital trajectory and splash down in the Indian Ocean as well.— Will 2025 be the year of Starship? SpaceX’s megarocket is growing up.— Starship and Super Heavy explained— SpaceX likely to get FAA approval for 25 Starship launches in 2025Starship Die Cast Rocket Model Now $47.99 on Amazon. If you can’t see SpaceX’s Starship in person, you can score a model of your own. Standing at 13.77 inches (35 cm), this is a 1:375 ratio of SpaceX’s Starship as a desktop model. The materials here are alloy steel and it weighs just 225g.Starship Flight 7 will come just a day after the debut launch of Blue Origin’s powerful New Glenn rocket, if all goes according to plan.And there will be exciting spaceflight action shortly thereafter as well: A SpaceX Falcon 9 is scheduled to launch a pair of private moon landers toward Earth’s nearest neighbor early on Jan. 15.Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, “Out There,” was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.Blue Origin delays 1st New Glenn rocket launch due to rough seas for landingSpaceX to launch 7th batch of next-gen spy satellites for US government tonightOpticron Explorer WA ED-R 8×42 monocular reviewSpace is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site.©
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