Starship rocket ready for launch, says Elon Musk

Tech billionaire Elon Musk has announced that his Starship rocket is ready for lift-off from SpaceX's launch facility in the US, pending approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). 

The FAA has listed the rocket's orbital test flight reportedly on April 17, which will be the first-ever attempt to launch the Starship spacecraft into orbit around Earth.

Starship preparing for launch 🚀 pic.twitter.com/M1pR8rsmYt

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 6, 2023

Starship claims to be the world's most powerful rocket and is designed to send humans to the Moon and eventually to Mars.

It is made up of a giant first-stage booster called Super Heavy and a 50-meter upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship. Both vehicles are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable and are powered by SpaceX's next-gen Raptor engine.

However, Musk has admitted there is only a 50 per cent chance of success for the first-ever orbital mission of SpaceX's huge Starship vehicle, but they are building multiple Starship vehicles at the South Texas site, increasing the likelihood of a successful launch.

If successful, Starship—specifically Ship 24—will launch from SpaceX’s Starbase on Boca Chica Beach, Texas.

The orbital test flight will see a SpaceX Super Heavy and Starship launch vehicle attempt one full orbit of Earth before Starship’s re-entry and splashdown near Hawaii. The Super Heavy rocket booster will separate 170 seconds into flight and return to land approximately 32 km off the shore of the Boca Chica launch site in the Gulf of Mexico. The second stage (Starship) will orbit Earth before a powered, targeted splashdown approximately 100 km off the northwest coast of Kauai, Hawaii.

The Starship spacecraft is also designed for everything from Moon landings and interplanetary exploration to suborbital supersonic flights on Earth.

In April 2021, NASA selected SpaceX to develop a human landing system variant of its Starship vehicle to take astronauts to the lunar surface during NASA’s Artemis III mission. That’s penciled-in for 2025, though it will likely be pushed back. SpaceX will conduct an uncrewed demonstration mission to the Moon prior to Artemis III.

The Polaris Programme, revealed in February 2022, is a tie-up with SpaceX that will see up to three human spaceflight missions to demonstrate new technologies. The first mission, Polaris Dawn, is targeted for no earlier than the fourth quarter of 2023 and will see SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft containing four astronauts fly 870 miles above Earth—the highest since the Apollo missions to the Moon. The third mission is scheduled to be the first flight of SpaceX’s Starship with humans on board.