SpaceX to launch Starship megarocket’s Flight 7 test mission on Jan. 13 – Space.com
Liftoff is targeted for 5 p.m. ET on Monday (Jan. 13).
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
SpaceX’s Starship will fly for the seventh time ever early next week, if all goes according to plan.SpaceX announced today (Jan. 8) that it’s targeting Monday (Jan. 13) for Flight 7 of Starship, the 400-foot-tall (122 meters), fully reusable megarocket designed to help humanity settle the moon and Mars.Starship is scheduled to lift off Monday at 5 p.m. EST (2200 GMT) from Starbase, SpaceX’s manufacturing and launch site in South Texas. You’ll be able to watch the action live; the company will webcast the flight beginning about 35 minutes before liftoff.Starship has flown six times to date — twice in 2023 and in March, June, October and November of last year.Related: SpaceX’s Starship Flight 7 test flight will deploy simulated Starlink satellites for 1st timeThe October mission featured an unprecedented catch of Starship’s Super Heavy booster by Starbase’s launch tower, a feat that SpaceX will try to repeat on Flight 7. (That was the plan on Flight 6 in November as well, but a communication issue with the tower scuttled a catch attempt on that mission.)Starship’s 165-foot-tall (50 m) upper stage, known as Starship or simply Ship, will come down for a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean on Monday, as it did on its three most recent launches.Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more!SpaceX will attempt to break some new ground on the upcoming mission as well. For example, for the first time ever, Ship will attempt to deploy payloads in space — 10 mock satellites, “similar in size and weight to next-generation Starlink satellites as the first exercise of a satellite deploy mission,” SpaceX wrote in a Flight 7 mission description. (Starlink is SpaceX’s broadband megaconstellation in low Earth orbit. The company is counting on Starship to finish building the huge network, which could eventually feature more than 40,000 spacecraft.)”The Starlink simulators will be on the same suborbital trajectory as Starship, with splashdown targeted in the Indian Ocean,” SpaceX added.— Starship and Super Heavy explained— SpaceX likely to get FAA approval for 25 Starship launches in 2025— SpaceX’s Starship booster was ‘1 second away’ from aborting epic launch-tower catchStarship 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.Super Heavy will also sport reused hardware for the first time on Flight 7 — “a Raptor engine from the booster launched and returned on Starship’s fifth flight test,” according to the mission description.Monday’s Starship launch will be part of a busy and exciting spaceflight stretch, if all goes to plan. The debut launch of Blue Origin’s powerful New Glenn rocket is scheduled for early Friday morning (Jan. 10), for example, and a SpaceX Falcon 9 is slated to send a pair of private moon landers skyward in the wee hours of 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.SpaceX launches 21 new Starlink satellites from FloridaHow NASA and Sierra Space are preparing for Dream Chaser space plane’s 1st flight to ISSNASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab closed due to raging LA firesSpace is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site.©
Future US, Inc. Full 7th Floor, 130 West 42nd Street,
New York,
NY 10036.
