SpaceX’s new “V3” Starship megarocket will fly for the first time ever on Thursday (May 21), and you can watch the highly anticipated action live.
Starship Version 3 — the biggest and most powerful iteration of the vehicle yet — is scheduled to debut Thursday with a suborbital test flight that lifts off from SpaceX’s Starbase site in South Texas.
Launch will occur during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT; 5:30 p.m. local Texas time). You can watch it live here at Space.com courtesy of SpaceX, or directly via the company’s website; coverage will start about 45 minutes before liftoff.
Though this will the first flight for V3, it will be the 12th overall for Starship. The giant rocket first launched in April 2023 on a suborbital test mission that ended in an explosion not long after liftoff.
SpaceX has made considerable progress since then. For example, the most recent two Starship missions — Flight 10 and Flight 11, which launched in August and October of last year, respectively — were completely successful, according to the company.
On both flights, Starship’s Super Heavy booster steered itself to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. The rocket’s upper stage, known as “Ship,” successfully deployed payloads (eight dummy Starlink satellites in each case) and made a splashdown of its own in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia.
The goals are broadly the same for Flight 12, with a few twists. For instance, this time, Ship will aim to deploy 20 dummy Starlink craft as well as two “specially modified” real Starlink satellites.
“The two modified satellites will test hardware planned for Starlink V3 and will attempt to scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to test methods of analyzing Starship’s heat shield readiness for return to launch site on future missions,” SpaceX wrote in a Flight 12 mission description.
The entire suborbital test will take a little over an hour, if all goes to plan. Super Heavy’s splashdown will occur about seven minutes after liftoff, with Ship following suit 58 minutes later.
There’s a lot riding on Flight 12, and not just because it will be the first Starship launch in more than seven months. SpaceX is developing the giant vehicle to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, among other tasks, and V3 is the first Starship iteration capable of making such trips.
So SpaceX is doubtless keen to see how the vehicle flies. And so is NASA, which picked Starship to be one of the two crewed landers for its Artemis program of moon exploration.
If all goes well with Flight 12 and subsequent test missions, Starship could launch on the Artemis 3 docking test in Earth orbit late next year, and then land astronauts near the lunar south pole on Artemis 4 in 2028. Or, those honors could go to Blue Origin’s Blue Moon, the other private lander in the Artemis stable.