SpaceX plans to launch Flight 11 of its Starship megarocket on Monday night (Oct. 13), and you may watch the motion stay.
Starship, the most important and strongest rocket ever constructed, is scheduled to carry off for the eleventh time on Monday (Oct. 13), throughout a 75-minute window that opens at 7:15 p.m. EDT (2315 GMT).
The launch will happen from SpaceX‘s Starbase web site in South Texas. You’ll be able to watch it stay right here at Area.com courtesy of the corporate; protection will start about half-hour earlier than liftoff.
Starship consists of a first-stage booster known as Tremendous Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft often known as Starship, or Ship for brief. Each of those parts are designed to be absolutely and quickly reusable.
SpaceX believes that the automobile’s unprecedented mixture of energy and reusability will enable humanity to settle Mars, a long-held dream of company founder and CEO Elon Musk.
Starship Flight 11 will look a lot like Flight 10, if all goes according to plan. On that most recent launch, which took place on Aug. 26, Super Heavy steered itself to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about 6.5 minutes after liftoff, and Ship did that same in the Indian Ocean roughly an hour later.
Ship also managed to relight one of its Raptor engines in space and deploy some payloads — eight dummy versions of SpaceX’s Starlink broadband satellites.
Those will be the main goals for Flight 11 as well. SpaceX also plans to test a new landing burn engine configuration for Super Heavy and gather data that will help pave the way for Ship to end its missions with a return to Starbase, where it will be caught by the launch tower’s “chopstick” arms.
Super Heavy has already done this on three previous Starship test flights. In fact, the booster flying on Monday is a spaceflight veteran, having conducted Starship Flight 8 earlier this year.
“For reentry, tiles have been removed from Starship to intentionally stress-test vulnerable areas across the vehicle,” SpaceX wrote in a Flight 11 mission description.
“A number of of the lacking tiles are in areas the place tiles are bonded to the automobile and don’t have a backup ablative layer,” the corporate added. “To imitate the trail a ship will tackle future flights returning to Starbase, the ultimate part of Starship’s trajectory on Flight 11 features a dynamic banking maneuver and can check subsonic steerage algorithms previous to a touchdown burn and splashdown within the Indian Ocean.”
