SpaceX has had three days to get the pressure right and will try again this morning for the first-ever launch of what would be the most powerful rocket to ever lift off from the planet.
The combined Starship and Super Heavy aims for liftoff from SpaceX’s launch facility Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas during a 62-minute window that opens at 9:28 a.m. EDT.
The stacked first-stage and spacecraft only received the OK from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly last Friday, and teams attempted a launch on Monday that was ultimately scrubbed because of a stuck valve, according to CEO Elon Musk.
SpaceX announced it would try again on Thursday, which happens to be 4/20 on the calendar, one of Musk’s favorite references to drop on his Twitter account as it’s also a reference to 4:20, the time of day people often associate with smoking marijuana.
“Perhaps inevitable,” Musk wrote on Twitter after SpaceX updated the target launch date and time.
Standing at 395 feet tall, the next-generation rocket features a first-stage booster with 33 Raptor engines capable of producing more than 17 million pounds of thrust, which nearly doubles the power of last November’s launch of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket on the Artemis I mission, the current record holder for most powerful rocket to ever make it to space.
The Starship spacecraft atop the booster has six of its own Raptor engines, and this test flight aims to send Starship into space, but only on a suborbital flight that doesn’t circle the Earth entirely and has Starship making a hard water landing near Hawaii. The booster also aims for a hard water landing after separation over the Gulf of Mexico after liftoff.
The launch system, though, is designed so that eventually, the Super Heavy booster would return to the 469-foot-tall launch integration tower often referred to as “Mechazilla,” with a vertical landing captured with the aid of two pivoting metal arms called the “chopsticks.” The Starship spacecraft would make a vertical landing at its destination as well, which would make the combination the first fully reusable rocket in the industry.
So far SpaceX has only flown short altitude flights of Starship. This is the first time SpaceX will send a stacked version for a test launch, and is slated to be one of many before it will begin commercial operations.
Dozens if not more than 100 of those will be needed as well before SpaceX lets humans on board, but it has at least three commercial human spaceflight missions already lined up as well as being awarded the NASA contract to land the next humans to walk on the moon.
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