SpaceX’s Starship is set to be the largest and most powerful rocket ever, and it could one day take humans to
Mars if the space exploration company’s CEO
Elon Musk is to be believed. The rocket is finally scheduled to launch on Thursday after numerous dramatic setbacks over the past few years. The last two launch attempts resulted in massive explosions just mere minutes after take off, with some scientists comparing these incidents to a
volcano blast in terms of their raw power. The aftermath of an April 2023 launch attempt was so great that it drew criticism from environmentalists about its impact on nearby towns and wildlife. SpaceX, which is one of Nasa’s foremost partners, has huge plans for the rocket. Elon Musk has even gone as far as to predict that there could eventually be an entire fleet of 100 Starships, which could eventually bring one million humans to Mars by 2050. But more pressingly, the rocket is pegged to facilitate Nasa’s Artemis III mission to the Moon, which is slated to happen in 2026 and would be the first manned space journey to the
moon in over 50 years. In the short term, it will also be used for missions to low earth orbit. If successful, Starship will also be fully reusable, meaning regular space travel at a fairly affordable cost, at least for space travel. It’s also a huge financial test for the company.
SpaceX estimates that it has so far spent roughly $3bn on the project from July 2014 to May 2023. Read Next Elon Musk's SpaceX loses Starship rocket after
explosion following lift-off When is the SpaceX Starship test launch? The launch is due to take place at noon
UK time (8am EST, 7am CST) on Thursday 14 March . The live stream will start at 11.30am UK time (7.30am EST, 6.30am CST). The rocket is set to launch from SpaceX’s base in Boca Chica,
Texas, where the company has been working on Starship since 2019. This is a departure from the company, which has generally chosen to use the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral,
Florida, for its high-profile launches. The entire launch, if successful, should take around one hour. This, the SpaceX hopes, will involve the rocket flying around the Earth in low orbit, before then landing in the Indian Ocean in a controlled crash. During this time, the rocket’s booster, which carries its fuel, will separate from the craft about three minutes into the journey and drop into the Gulf of
Mexico. How can I watch a live stream? The launch is available to stream on SpaceX’s official page on X , formerly known as
Twitter, as well as SpaceX’s website . It was possible to catch previous streams on
YouTube, but SpaceX has now stopped posting them to the platform, perhaps because it could be seen as a rival to Musk-owned X. If you manage to miss the initial launch, that’s not necessarily a problem. SpaceX has archived all previous launches on its website’s archives for later viewing. What is the purpose of the launch? SpaceX as a company is known to take an “iterative” approach to the design process, which means it looks to build and test its vehicles as soon as it can, and then learn and gather data from any mistakes that happen along the way. This a far different approach to the one taken by Nasa, which generally uses a more careful and safety-centric approach to design. This means, SpaceX argues, that even if the launch is not successful, it could successfully contribute to building a base for future space travel. It has termed the previous Starship explosions as “a rapid unscheduled disassembly” and said they still succeeded in their purpose of developing the company’s technology. However,
NASA has explicitly said that to meet its safety requirements for the upcoming moon mission, Starship will need to complete 14 successful launches, giving the company a tight window for success.