SpaceX is gearing up for the first orbital flight of its Starship megarocket, which is now just a week away.
Starship's huge first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, was rolled out to the pad at SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas, the company revealed in an X post today (Sept. 21).
The booster will be paired with its Ship upper stage on the launch mount soon. If all goes according to plan, the duo will lift off on Sept. 28, on Starship's most ambitious flight to date.
The upcoming test mission will be Starship's 14th to date but the first to go orbital.
The flight plan calls for Super Heavy to make a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after liftoff. Ship, meanwhile, will power its way to low Earth orbit, where it will deploy 26 of SpaceX's next-gen Starlink V3 satellites.
Flight 14 will therefore begin assembly of the Starlink V3 broadband megaconstellation, which SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said will eventually consist of about 100,000 satellites. (Ship deployed 20 V3 Starlinks two months ago on Flight 13, but they were on a suborbital trajectory and quickly came back down to Earth.)
Ship will stay in orbit for a while, circling our planet about six times before returning for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile roughly 10 hours after launch.
This will be a new landing locale for Ship; its suborbital missions came down in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia.
Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. Its current iteration stands 408 feet (124 meters) tall, and future versions will be even larger, Musk has said.
In addition, both of its stages are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable — the "holy grail of rocketry," according to SpaceX. The company thinks Starship will revolutionize spaceflight, making settlement of the moon and Mars economically feasible at long last.
