SpaceX targeting Oct. 13 for next Starship megarocket launch

SpaceX’s Starship megarocket will fly again less than two weeks from now, if all goes according to plan.

SpaceX announced on Monday (Sept. 29) that it’s targeting Oct. 13 for Starship Flight 11, which will be the final launch of the vehicle’s current “Version 2” iteration.

Liftoff will occur from SpaceX’s Starbase site in South Texas. The window on Oct. 13 will open at 7:15 p.m. EDT (2315 GMT; 6:15 p.m. local Texas time), SpaceX wrote in an update on Monday. The company will webcast the action, beginning 30 minutes before liftoff.

SpaceX is developing Starship to help humanity settle Mars, a long-held dream of company founder and CEO Elon Musk. The vehicle consists of two stainless-steel elements, both of which are designed to be fully reusable — a first-stage booster called Super Heavy and an upper stage known as Starship, or Ship for short.

Starship Version 2 is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, towering nearly 400 feet (121 meters) above the ground when stacked. The next variant — Version 3, which will debut on Flight 12 — is larger still, at 408 feet (124.4 m) tall.

But the rocket will get even bigger over time, if all goes to plan: Version 4, which is expected to debut in 2027, is expected to be around 466 feet (142 m) tall.

Starship Flight 11 will be very similar to Flight 10, which lifted off on Aug. 26 and was a complete success.

On that most recent flight, Super Heavy steered itself to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico as planned. Ship did the same in the Indian Ocean off the west coast of Australia — but not before deploying eight dummy versions of SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites.

Flight 11 will target those same two splashdown zones, and Ship will aim to deploy another eight mock Starlinks, SpaceX wrote in Monday’s update. And, as on Flight 10, SpaceX will remove some heat-shield tiles from Ship “to intentionally stress-test vulnerable areas across the vehicle.”

Super Heavy, meanwhile, will demonstrate “a unique landing burn engine configuration planned to be used on the next generation Super Heavy.” That plan calls for the booster to use five of its 33 Raptor engines to fine-tune its descent instead of the usual three, “adding additional redundancy for spontaneous engine shutdowns.” The five-engine fine-tuning burn will be the baseline for Version 3 of Super Heavy, SpaceX wrote in the update.

And Flight 11 will be the second launch for this particular booster. It also completed Flight 8 this past March, coming back to Starbase for a catch by the “chopstick” arms of the launch tower — the planned recovery strategy for both Super Heavy and Ship on operational launches. Twenty-four of the Flight 11 Super Heavy’s 33 Raptors are flight-proven, according to SpaceX.

This will be the second reuse of a Super Heavy. SpaceX also employed a flight-proven booster on Flight 9, which launched on May 27.