SpaceX's Starship megarocket will get off the ground again in mid-March, if all goes according to plan.
The company plans to launch Starship's next test flight in six weeks, Elon Musk said Sunday (Jan. 25) via X, the social media platform he bought in October 2022 (when it was still known as Twitter).
The flight will be the 12th overall for Starship but the first of the bigger, more powerful "Version 3" (V3) iteration of the vehicle.
SpaceX is developing Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, to help humanity colonize Mars.
The giant vehicle consists of two elements: a booster called Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship, or simply Ship. Both stages are designed to be fully reusable, and both are powered by SpaceX's Raptor engine.
Starship debuted in April 2023 and now has 11 suborbital test flights under its belt, five of which occurred last year. The most recent two, which lifted off on Aug. 26 and Oct. 13, were completely successful, but there was a hiccup in the leadup to Flight 12: The Super Heavy originally slated for the mission buckled during testing in November, forcing SpaceX to get another booster ready.
Flight 12 will mark the debut of Starship V3, which is slightly taller than V2 — 408.1 feet (124.4 meters) vs. 403.9 feet (123.1 m) — but considerably more powerful. V3 can loft more than 100 tons of payload to low Earth orbit, compared to about 35 tons for V2, according to Musk.
The increased brawn comes courtesy of Raptor 3, a new variant of the engine that will fly for the first time on the upcoming test mission.
Flight 12 will be a pretty big deal, because Starship V3 is the first iteration of the megarocket that's capable of flying to Mars. If things go well with this and other upcoming test missions — which must demonstrate key capabilities such as reaching Earth orbit and in-space refueling — SpaceX could potentially launch a small fleet of uncrewed Starship V3 vehicles to the Red Planet late this year, Musk has said.
