SpaceX rolls Starship out to pad ahead of Flight 7 test launch (photos)

SpaceX is gearing up for the next test flight of its Starship megarocket, which is just a few days away.

The company rolled Starship’s 165-foot-tall (50-meter-tall) upper stage — known as Starship, or simply “Ship” — out to the launch pad at its Starbase site in South Texas this morning (Jan. 9).

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk announced the milestone in a post on X. That update featured four photos of the move, which occurred during predawn hours.

a large silver rocket rolls down a road at night, passing close to a lit-up building — Another shot of the 165-foot-tall (50 m) spacecraft on the move. (Image credit: Elon Musk via X)

Starship is scheduled to launch from Starbase on Monday (Jan. 13) at 5:00 p.m. EST (2200 GMT). It will be the seventh test flight for the giant rocket, which SpaceX is developing to help humanity settle Mars and achieve a variety of other exploration feats.

Related: SpaceX’s Starship Flight 7 test flight will deploy simulated Starlink satellites for 1st time

Both of Starship’s stages — Ship and the huge first-stage booster, known as “Super Heavy” — are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. SpaceX plans to showcase a key part of that reuse strategy during Flight 7, landing Super Heavy back at Starbase’s launch tower, which will catch the booster with its “chopstick” arms.

SpaceX made such a catch on Starship’s Flight 5 this past October. It aimed to repeat the feat on Flight 6 a month later, but a communication problem with the tower scuttled that attempt.

Ship, meanwhile, will splash down in the Indian Ocean about an hour after liftoff, as it did on both of those prior missions. But the upper stage will do something new on Flight 7, deploying 10 mock satellites — inactive versions of SpaceX’s Starlink broadband craft — which will follow Ship’s suborbital trajectory and splash down in the Indian Ocean as well.

a large silver rocket rolls down a road at night, passing close to a lit-up building

Ship will be mated with its Super Heavy partner, creating a vehicle that stands about 400 feet (122 meters) tall. (Image credit: Elon Musk via X)

Starship Flight 7 will come just a day after the debut launch of Blue Origin’s powerful New Glenn rocket, if all goes according to plan.

And there will be exciting spaceflight action shortly thereafter as well: A SpaceX Falcon 9 is scheduled to launch a pair of private moon landers toward Earth’s nearest neighbor early on Jan. 15.