SpaceX to launch Starship megarocket’s Flight 7 test mission on Jan. 13

SpaceX’s Starship will fly for the seventh time ever early next week, if all goes according to plan.

SpaceX announced today (Jan. 8) that it’s targeting Monday (Jan. 13) for Flight 7 of Starship, the 400-foot-tall (122 meters), fully reusable megarocket designed to help humanity settle the moon and Mars.

Starship is scheduled to lift off Monday at 5 p.m. EST (2200 GMT) from Starbase, SpaceX’s manufacturing and launch site in South Texas. You’ll be able to watch the action live; the company will webcast the flight beginning about 35 minutes before liftoff.

Starship has flown six times to date — twice in 2023 and in March, June, October and November of last year.

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

The October mission featured an unprecedented catch of Starship’s Super Heavy booster by Starbase’s launch tower, a feat that SpaceX will try to repeat on Flight 7. (That was the plan on Flight 6 in November as well, but a communication issue with the tower scuttled a catch attempt on that mission.)

Starship’s 165-foot-tall (50 m) upper stage, known as Starship or simply Ship, will come down for a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean on Monday, as it did on its three most recent launches.

SpaceX will attempt to break some new ground on the upcoming mission as well. For example, for the first time ever, Ship will attempt to deploy payloads in space — 10 mock satellites, “similar in size and weight to next-generation Starlink satellites as the first exercise of a satellite deploy mission,” SpaceX wrote in a Flight 7 mission description. (Starlink is SpaceX’s broadband megaconstellation in low Earth orbit. The company is counting on Starship to finish building the huge network, which could eventually feature more than 40,000 spacecraft.)

“The Starlink simulators will be on the same suborbital trajectory as Starship, with splashdown targeted in the Indian Ocean,” SpaceX added.

Super Heavy will also sport reused hardware for the first time on Flight 7 — “a Raptor engine from the booster launched and returned on Starship’s fifth flight test,” according to the mission description.

Monday’s Starship launch will be part of a busy and exciting spaceflight stretch, if all goes to plan. The debut launch of Blue Origin’s powerful New Glenn rocket is scheduled for early Friday morning (Jan. 10), for example, and a SpaceX Falcon 9 is slated to send a pair of private moon landers skyward in the wee hours of Jan. 15.