SpaceX is launching its 13th flight test of the Starship rocket and its Super Heavy booster on Thursday evening, marking the next step for Elon Musk’s efforts to take astronauts back to the Moon and land humans on Mars.
The 90-minute launch window for the world’s largest and most powerful rocket will open at 6:45 p.m, when Starship Version 3 is set to take off from Starbase, SpaceX’s company town in south Texas. The towering V3, which is over 400 feet tall, is known as the most advanced iteration of the megarocket. It is expected to be used by NASA to land astronauts on the moon in 2028 for the first time since 1969, as well as for SpaceX’s first Mars missions.
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The big day for Musk comes as his company has seen a downturn in recent weeks, with shares of SpaceX’s stock down roughly 50% from the record high set shortly after its historic IPO in June. Prices per share reached above $225 in mid-June, but have since plunged to $118 on Thursday. On Monday, SpaceX shares dropped over 3%, marking seven straight days of losses and a new low.
The latest Flight 13 mission was originally set to take place on July 16, but it was forced into a last-second abort before liftoff when some of its 33 engines failed to start.
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The Starship test flight will last just over an hour, but will not enter orbit. The flight’s primary test objective will be “executing a successful launch, ascent, stage separation, boostback burn, and landing burn at an offshore landing point in the Gulf of America,” according to SpaceX, which noted that there have been several modifications to hardware and software to address issues seen on the previous flight 12 on May 22.
A major theme of Starship development has been to reduce the cost of going to space by designing the system to be fully reusable, dropping the costs to reach orbit by some 90%.
