Starship — the spacecraft that Elon Musk says will one day take people to Mars — is back on a launch mount in South Texas and ready for its eighth test flight.
On Monday night, SpaceX flight controllers halted their countdown with about 30 seconds to go, and then decided several minutes later that they weren’t ready to launch. After several days of work, the company is ready to try again what is to be largely a do-over of the seventh flight, which launched in January.
In that test, Starship’s mammoth booster, or the bottom of the rocket, successfully returned to the launchpad, but the upper-stage spacecraft disintegrated over the Caribbean, with some debris landing on the Turks and Caicos Islands.
Here’s what you need to know about Thursday’s flight, which the company aims to bring to a less explosive conclusion
The launch is scheduled to occur during a one-hour window beginning at 6:30 p.m. Eastern time from Starbase, SpaceX’s launch site in South Texas. The company has started loading of propellents into the rocket, and SpaceX is providing live video coverage of the countdown, which you can watch in the video player above.
The Starship rocket system is the largest ever built. At 403 feet tall, it’s nearly 100 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty atop its pedestal.
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