SpaceX may launch Starship orbital test flight next week: reports

SpaceX’s giant Starship Mars rocket could attempt to go orbital for the first time as soon as next week.

SpaceX is developing Starship to carry people and cargo to the moon, Mars and beyond. The deep-space transportation system consists of a huge first-stage booster called Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship, both of which are designed to be fully reusable.

For months now, SpaceX has been gearing up for the first-ever Starship orbital test flight, which will be carried out by the Super Heavy prototype Booster 7 and a Starship vehicle called Ship 24. 

In mid-March, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said that the landmark flight, from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in South Texas, might launch as soon as the third week of April. But recent developments suggest that the attempt could come even sooner than that.

Related: SpaceX’s 1st orbital Starship looks supercool in these fueling test photos

For example, SpaceX rolled Ship 24 out to Starbase’s orbital launch pad (opens in new tab) over the weekend, multiple Starship watchers have observed. And on Monday (April 3), the company conducted fueling tests with Booster 7 (opens in new tab) on the orbital launch mount, with Ship 24 on the ground nearby. 

In addition, navigational warnings have been issued for the Starship orbital attempt, as Netherlands-based satellite tracker Marco Langbroek noted (opens in new tab). Those warnings cover a window of April 6 to April 12.

It doesn’t appear that SpaceX will try to hit the first part of that proposed window. For starters, the company is still waiting for a launch license from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, as Musk said last month.

But April 10 or April 11 look like real possibilities, according to Ars Technica’s Eric Berger. 

NASA is apparently tentatively reserving “the use of its high-altitude WB-57 aircraft for observations of the Starship test flight on April 10 and 11,” Berger wrote over the weekend (opens in new tab). “The agency is closely tracking SpaceX’s progress with the massive rocket, as it intends to use the Starship vehicle as a lunar lander for its astronauts as part of the Artemis moon missions.”

The orbital test flight will attempt to send Ship 24 on one lap around Earth, culminating with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean near the Hawaiian island of Kauai. 

Musk said recently that Starship has about a 50% chance of success on that debut try. But SpaceX is building multiple Starship prototypes at Starbase and plans to launch them in relatively quick succession when they’re ready.

“So I think we’ve got, hopefully, about an 80% chance of reaching orbit this year,” Musk said on March 7 during an interview at the Morgan Stanley Conference (opens in new tab).

Mike Wall is the author of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in new tab).