SpaceX plans to launch Flight 11 of its Starship megarocket on Monday evening (Oct. 13), and you can watch the action live.
Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, is scheduled to lift off for the 11th time on Monday (Oct. 13), during a 75-minute window that opens at 7:15 p.m. EDT (2315 GMT).
The launch will take place from SpaceX‘s Starbase site in South Texas. You can watch it live here at Space.com courtesy of the company; coverage will begin about 30 minutes before liftoff.
Starship consists of a first-stage booster called Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship, or Ship for short. Both of these elements are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable.
SpaceX believes that the vehicle’s unprecedented combination of power and reusability will allow 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.
“Several of the missing tiles are in areas where tiles are bonded to the vehicle and do not have a backup ablative layer,” the company added. “To mimic the path a ship will take on future flights returning to Starbase, the final phase of Starship’s trajectory on Flight 11 includes a dynamic banking maneuver and will test subsonic guidance algorithms prior to a landing burn and splashdown in the Indian Ocean.”
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