SpaceX plans to launch its massive Starship rocket early Monday morning, aiming to become the first spacecraft to reach orbit.
The 75-minute launch window will begin at 8:15 a.m. Eastern time, or 7:15 a.m. local time, from the corporate city of Starbase, Texas, according to SpaceX’s website.
The Federal Aviation Administration told CNBC in an email that it issued a “License Authorization for SpaceX Starship Super Heavy Flight 14 Launch and Reentry Operations” on September 26. Along with Starship’s 14th test flight, Elon Musk’s aerospace and defense company also plans to field 26 new Starlink V3 satellites.
Starship is critical to SpaceX’s expansion plans. The company is counting on the giant rocket to expand its Starlink connectivity business, its largest and only revenue-generating unit as of the second quarter. SpaceX currently operates about 11,000 active satellites in orbit, compared to its competitor Eutelsat OneWeb, which has about 650 satellites.
“It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that at some point Starlink will provide a large portion of the world’s internet, at least to the countries where we are authorized to operate, which is the majority of countries,” Musk said during SpaceX’s earnings call in August.
SpaceX went public in June in the largest IPO in history and is now valued at about $2 trillion.
SpaceX designed the Starship Super Heavy rocket and booster to be fully reusable and able to lift more cargo into orbit at a lower cost than any previous spacecraft. None of the previous 13 test flights were scheduled to go into orbit, but on the 14th flight, SpaceX hopes Starship will orbit the Earth.
The company is preparing Starship for NASA’s big test flight next year, and will use the rocket to bring American astronauts back to the moon.
SpaceX Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell said at the All-In Summit earlier this month that the company plans to use Starship to bring “supercomputing to space” and launch “AI computing satellites” into orbit in 2027.
The company’s new V3 satellites are built at the SpaceX facility in Redmond, Washington, and are equipped with solar arrays that generate twice the power of previous generations. It is also larger and designed to be more powerful, allowing data to be sent to Starlink subscribers more quickly than previous versions.
Attention: SpaceX has advantages that rivals cannot easily match
