The Starship mega rocket is getting ready for its next flight. SpaceX announced the date

Starship is a two-stage mega rocket, measuring over 121 meters. Its first stage is the Super Heavy booster (i.e. carrier module), and the second is Starship, which is a spacecraft. The rocket is intended to carry the largest loads into orbit and significantly reduce the costs of such transport.

SpaceX announced that the next, sixth flight test of the mega rocket may take place on November 18.

The fifth – and at the same time the first fully successful – test flight of the rocket took place on October 13 this year.

After lifting the rocket, the Super Heavy booster detached safely and precisely returned to the launch platform. After an hour of flight, the second module of the ship “landed in a controlled manner” in the Indian Ocean, completing the successful test flight.

The Starship is intended not only to carry the largest payloads, but also to play a key role in the colonization of the Moon and, later, Mars. A sufficiently large fleet of Starships may even allow for a permanent transport connection with the Moon. Musk's company hopes that thanks to the project, in the future, humans will become an interplanetary species, inhabiting, among others, the planet Mars. He also has hopes for the SpaceX mission NASAthe American space agency that wants to send its astronauts to the Moon using the Starship rocket as part of the Artemis 3 mission, scheduled for 2026.

Previous test flights of the rocket, apart from the fifth one, ended with ship explosions, either immediately after take-off or during an attempt to land.

During the first attempt, in April 2023, the spacecraft exploded in mid-air. The explosion occurred about 4 minutes after launch when it failed to detach from the Super Heavy rocket carrying it. Another failed attempt took place in November 2023. The upper stage of the rocket detached from the first stage, but it exploded after detachment.

During its third flight in March 2024, Starship performed its first atmospheric re-entry maneuver from space. It was then destroyed, but during the flight the engineers collected a lot of data that was difficult to overestimate. During the fourth test flight on June 6 this year. – as planned – a few minutes after launch, the booster separated and then fell into the Gulf of Mexico – the Starhip ship survived the entry into the atmosphere and was then launched.