SpaceX is preparing for the upcoming test flight of its Starship megaflight vehicle, which is just a few days away.
This morning (Jan. 9), the company transitioned Starship’s 165-foot-tall (50-meter-tall) upper section—referred to as Starship, or simply “Ship”—to the launch pad at its Starbase facility in South Texas.
Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, shared the significant development in a post on X. The announcement included four images of the operation, which took place in the early hours of the morning.
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Starship is set to launch from Starbase on Monday (Jan. 13) at 5:00 p.m. EST (2200 GMT). This will be the seventh test flight for the massive rocket, which SpaceX is developing to assist humanity in colonizing Mars and accomplishing various other exploratory endeavors.
Related: SpaceX’s Starship Flight 7 test flight will deploy simulated Starlink satellites for the first time
Both stages of Starship—the Ship and the enormous first-stage booster called “Super Heavy”—are engineered to be entirely and swiftly reusable. SpaceX intends to demonstrate a crucial aspect of that reuse plan during Flight 7, landing Super Heavy back at Starbase’s launch structure, which will capture the booster using its “chopstick” arms.
Such a catch was achieved by SpaceX on Starship’s Flight 5 last October. The goal was to repeat this feat on Flight 6 the following month, but a communication issue with the tower thwarted that effort.
Meanwhile, Ship is expected to land in the Indian Ocean roughly an hour after launch, as it did on both previous flights. However, the upper stage will undertake something novel on Flight 7, releasing 10 dummy satellites—inactive iterations of SpaceX’s Starlink broadband modules—following Ship’s suborbital path to also land in the Indian Ocean.
Starship Flight 7 is anticipated to occur just one day after the inaugural launch of Blue Origin’s formidable New Glenn rocket, presuming all proceeds as planned.
Furthermore, there will be thrilling spaceflight activities shortly thereafter: A SpaceX Falcon 9 is set to launch a pair of private lunar landers towards Earth’s nearest satellite early on Jan. 15.
