SpaceX prepares for the seventh flight of the Starship rocket

The 7th launch of SpaceX’s Starship super rocket will take place next month, according to Space. After a recent static fire test of the giant Super Heavy booster on the vehicle’s first stage, the company is preparing to test the Starship upper stage. “Starship is ready for testing before its seventh flight,” SpaceX announced with a photo of the Starship vehicle moving to the test site at the company’s Starbase facility in South Texas.

SpaceX has not revealed the date of the upcoming hybrid test flight (IFT), but an email from NASA to the US Federal Aviation Administration identified the most likely target date as January 11. When the Starship upper stage stacks with the Super Heavy, the combined vehicle will be 122 meters tall, larger than any other rocket ever built. The upper floor nicknamed Ship is 50 meters high. Starship is the world’s first fully reusable launch vehicle. Both the Super Heavy and the Ship are designed to return to the launch site for mid-air capture by “chopsticks” on the launch tower.

SpaceX first tried to catch the Super Heavy rocket during its fifth test flight in October and was successful. The pair of chopsticks perfectly caught the booster rocket flying back to the ground. The company planned to do it again during IFT-6 on November 19, but communication problems with the tower forced them to cancel the attempt. Instead, Super Heavy switched to a controlled landing in the Gulf of Mexico. IFT-7 will be Starship’s first launch in 2025. 2024 recorded 4 Starship flights in the months of March, June, October and November, double the number of Starship flights in 2023.

The number of Starship launches in 2025 is expected to continue to increase as Starship fulfills its criteria for entering service. NASA has chosen SpaceX’s new vehicle as the lunar lander for the Artemis 3 mission.