On Monday, SpaceX began counting down to the launch of Starship, the most potent rocket ever created and the vehicle that will carry astronauts to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
According to SpaceX, the massive rocket was being fueled and was set to launch from Starbase, the company’s spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas, at 8:20 am Central Time (1320 GMT).
If Monday’s launch attempt is postponed, fallback times are scheduled for later in the week, according to billionaire SpaceX creator Elon Musk.
“It’s a very risky flight,” Musk said in a live event on Twitter Spaces on Sunday. “It’s the first launch of a very complicated, gigantic rocket.
“There’s a million ways this rocket could fail,” he added. “We’re going to be very careful and if we see anything that gives us concern, we’ll postpone.”
Musk stated that he wants to “set expectations low” since “probably tomorrow will not be successful — if by successful one means reaching orbit.”
For the first time since the Apollo program came to an end in 1972, NASA has chosen the Starship spacecraft to transport men to the Moon in late 2025. This mission is known as Artemis III.
Starship is made up of a 230-foot-tall first-stage Super Heavy booster rocket and a 164-foot (50-meter) tall spacecraft with room for crew and cargo.
The spaceship and the Super Heavy rocket, collectively known as Starship, have never taken off together, despite the spacecraft’s several sub-orbital test flights on its own.
If all goes according to plan, the Super Heavy booster will separate from Starship about three minutes after launch and splash down in the Gulf of Mexico.
Starship, which has six engines of its own, will continue to an altitude of nearly 150 miles, completing a near-circle of the Earth before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean about 90 minutes after launch.
“If it gets to orbit, that’s a massive success,” Musk said.
“If we get far enough away from the launchpad before something goes wrong then I think I would consider that to be a success,” he said. “Just don’t blow up the launchpad.
“The payload for this mission is information,” he said. “Information that allows us to improve the design of future Starship builds.”
‘Multi-planet civilization’
In February, SpaceX successfully tested the 33 Raptor engines on the Starship first-stage booster.
During the test-firing, also known as a static fire, the Super Heavy rocket was attached to the ground to stop it from taking off.
In November 2024, NASA will send astronauts to the moon on its own, using the Space Launch System (SLS), a hefty rocket that has been in development for more than ten years.
Starship is both bigger and more powerful than SLS.
It generates 17 million pounds of thrust, more than twice that of the Saturn V rockets used to send Apollo astronauts to the Moon.
SpaceX foresees eventually putting a Starship into orbit, and then refueling it with another Starship so it can continue on a journey to Mars or beyond.
Musk said the goal is to make Starship reusable and bring down the price to a few million dollars per flight.
“In the long run — long run meaning, I don’t know, two or three years — we should achieve full and rapid reusability,” he said.
The eventual objective is to establish bases on the Moon and Mars and put humans on the “path to being a multi-planet civilization,” Musk said.
“We are at this brief moment in civilization where it is possible to become a multi-planet species,” he said. “That’s our goal. I think we’ve got a chance.”
