Watch it live! SpaceX Starship megarocket launches into orbit for the first time – YouTube Watch On SpaceX’s Starship megarocket will attempt to enter orbit for the first time on Monday morning (September 28), and you can watch the historic action live. Starship is scheduled to launch from SpaceX’s Starbase site in South Texas on Monday during a 75-minute window that opens at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT; 7:15 a.m. local Texas time). You can see it in the window above, courtesy of SpaceX. Coverage will begin approximately 30 minutes before takeoff. SpaceX’s Starship rocket sits on Starbase Pad 2 ahead of its 14th test flight. (Image credit: SpaceX) Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, standing 407 feet (124 meters) tall when fully stacked. Both stages – the Super Heavy booster and the Ship upper stage spacecraft – are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a breakthrough that SpaceX has called the “holy grail of rockets.” The company believes Starship will open up the skies like never before, allowing humanity to settle on the Moon and Mars, and perhaps venture even further. But the rocket is not yet ready for such world-changing work; It is still in the flight test phase. You may like Starship debuted in April 2023 and now has 13 missions under its belt, all of them suborbital. However, that will change on Monday, when the giant vehicle launches for the 14th time. Flight 14 will send the 171-foot-tall (52 m) craft into Earth orbit, where it will deploy 26 of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink Version 3 internet satellites. These will be the first members of a new low-Earth orbit (LEO) megaconstellation, which Elon Musk says will eventually be made up of 100,000 spacecraft. (SpaceX currently operates about 11,000 Starlink satellites in LEO.) The ship will circle our planet six times and then return home to splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile almost 10 hours after launch. This will be a big departure from Starship’s suborbital flights, which lasted a maximum of 65 minutes and were aimed at the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Western Australia. Super Heavy won’t stay in the air for that long; It is scheduled to land in the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after takeoff, as it has on previous flights. During operational flights, SpaceX plans to fly both the Super Heavy and the Ship back to the launch pad, where they will be trapped by the tower’s “chopstick” arms. The company has already done this three times with Super Heavy but has not yet tried it with Ship. That box will be checked on another flight. And Starship will also have other obstacles to overcome, even if today’s flight goes perfectly. For example, each Starship mission beyond Earth orbit will require multiple rendezvous with “tanker” ships to refuel the traveling spacecraft. SpaceX has yet to demonstrate propellant transfer away from Earth, so we’ll no doubt see that milestone on an upcoming test flight. The ship will also have to be equipped with a life support system before manned missions, which could come relatively soon. For example, NASA chose Ship to the as the first crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program, which aims to land people on the moon for the first time in 2028 on the Artemis IV mission.
