SpaceX plans to launch Flight 11 of its Starship megarocket on Monday night (Oct. 13), and you may watch the motion reside.
Starship, the largest and strongest rocket ever constructed, is scheduled to carry off for the eleventh time on Monday (Oct. 13), throughout a 75-minute window that opens at 7:15 p.m. EDT (2315 GMT).
The launch will happen from SpaceX‘s Starbase website in South Texas. You may watch it reside right here at House.com courtesy of the corporate; protection will start about half-hour earlier than liftoff.
Starship consists of a first-stage booster known as Tremendous Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft generally known as Starship, or Ship for brief. Each of those components are designed to be totally and quickly reusable.
SpaceX believes that the car’s unprecedented mixture of energy and reusability will permit humanity to settle Mars, a long-held dream of firm founder and CEO Elon Musk.
Starship Flight 11 will look so much like Flight 10, if all goes in line with plan. On that almost all current launch, which befell on Aug. 26, Tremendous Heavy steered itself to a splashdown within the Gulf of Mexico about 6.5 minutes after liftoff, and Ship did that very same within the Indian Ocean roughly an hour later.
Ship additionally managed to relight certainly one of its Raptor engines in area and deploy some payloads — eight dummy variations of SpaceX’s Starlink broadband satellites.
These would be the principal objectives for Flight 11 as nicely. SpaceX additionally plans to check a brand new touchdown burn engine configuration for Tremendous Heavy and collect information that may assist pave the way in which for Ship to finish its missions with a return to Starbase, the place it will likely be caught by the launch tower’s “chopstick” arms.
Tremendous Heavy has already achieved this on three earlier Starship check flights. The truth is, the booster flying on Monday is a spaceflight veteran, having carried out Starship Flight 8 earlier this yr.
“For reentry, tiles have been faraway from Starship to deliberately stress-test weak areas throughout the car,” SpaceX wrote in a Flight 11 mission description.
“A number of of the lacking tiles are in areas the place tiles are bonded to the car and would not have a backup ablative layer,” the corporate added. “To imitate the trail a ship will tackle future flights returning to Starbase, the ultimate part of Starship’s trajectory on Flight 11 features a dynamic banking maneuver and can check subsonic steering algorithms previous to a touchdown burn and splashdown within the Indian Ocean.”
