SpaceX prepares for first Starship orbital flight

SpaceX is preparing for the first orbital flight of its mega-rocket Starship, an event scheduled for just one week from now, while the Super Heavy booster was transported to the launch pad at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in South Texas, the company announced in a post on X, Space.com reports.

The booster will soon be stacked with the upper stage, known as the “Ship,” on the launch facility. If everything goes according to plan, the vehicle will lift off on September 28, marking the most ambitious flight of Starship to date, CE Report quotes AGERPRES.

The upcoming test mission will be the 14th for Starship, but the first to reach orbit.

The flight plan calls for Super Heavy to perform a controlled descent and splash down in the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after liftoff. Meanwhile, the upper stage, Ship, will continue its ascent to low Earth orbit, where it will deploy 26 Starlink V3 satellites, SpaceX’s next-generation satellites.

Thus, Flight 14 will mark the beginning of the deployment of the Starlink V3 broadband megaconstellation. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said it will eventually comprise about 100,000 satellites. Ship deployed 20 Starlink V3 satellites into space two months ago during Flight 13, but that mission followed a suborbital trajectory, and the satellites quickly returned to Earth.

Ship will remain in orbit for a period, completing about six revolutions around Earth before returning for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile, about 10 hours after launch.

This will be a new landing location for Ship. Its previous suborbital missions ended with splashdowns in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia.

Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. Its current version stands 124 meters tall, while future versions will be even larger, Musk said.

In addition, both stages of the rocket are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable — what SpaceX calls the “Holy Grail of rocket technology.” The company estimates that Starship will revolutionize spaceflight, finally making the colonization of the Moon and Mars economically viable.

Photo: SpaceX