The US space company SpaceX is planning an unmanned test flight of the most powerful giant rocket ever built for Monday Starship. “Success maybe, excitement guaranteed!” wrote the SpaceX founder Elon Musk on Friday evening (local time) in the online service Twitter.
The start should be at 07.00 (14.00 Uhr LIME) from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Texas. It would be Starship’s first flight into space. As with all rocket launches, however, it cannot be ruled out that this will have to be postponed due to weather conditions or technical problems.
Starship is larger than NASA’s SLS
The US Space Agency NASA currently plans to use Starship as a landing module as part of their Artemis program no earlier than 2025. The Starship rocket is significantly larger and more powerful than the NASA rocket SLSwith which the space agency wants to bring astronauts into orbit around the moon from 2024.
In February, almost all of the first stage engines of the Starship rocket were successfully ignited during a test at the Boca Chica missile base. SpaceX founder Elon Musk then declared that the 31 engines fired in the test were “enough to reach orbit”.
