Skip to main content

SpaceX is about to launch Starship for the 9th time. Here’s how to watch

SpaceX's Super Heavy launch during the fifth test flight of the Starship.
SpaceX's Super Heavy launch during the fifth test flight of the Starship. SpaceX

UPDATE: SpaceX has launched the rocket. Check out these spectacular images from the test flight.

SpaceX is about to launch the Starship — the world’s most powerful rocket — for the ninth time, and you can watch the event in real time.

Recommended Videos

The launch window for the  ninth flight test of Starship opens on Tuesday, May 27, at 6:30 p.m. CT (7:30 p.m. ET/4:30 p.m. PT).

A live webcast of the flight test will begin about 30 minutes before liftoff, and you can watch it on SpaceX’s X account.

The imminent flight test marks the first launch of a flight-proven Super Heavy booster, SpaceX has confirmed. The booster previously launched and returned on Starship’s seventh flight test, which took place in January.

The Super Heavy will also carry with it a range of experiments designed to generate data to help improve the performance and reliability of future boosters. 

But if you’re tuning in hoping to see if SpaceX can nail another spectacular landing of the booster, which involves a pair of giant mechanical arms clasping the vehicle as it comes home shortly after deploying the Starship spacecraft to orbit, then you’ll be disappointed. For this mission, SpaceX is trying out a more propellant-efficient descent, and so to “maximize the safety of launch infrastructure” at its Starbase site in Boca Chica, Texas, it will send the booster into the ocean.

As with every Starship flight, don’t expect everything to go entirely smoothly. 

“Developmental testing by definition is unpredictable,” the company said prior to Tuesday’s test. “But by putting hardware in a flight environment as frequently as possible, we’re able to quickly learn and execute design changes as we seek to bring Starship online as a fully and rapidly reusable vehicle.”

SpaceX wants to use the Starship for the first crewed flight to Mars, which could take place in the 2030s. Before that, the Elon Musk-led spaceflight company wants to send an uncrewed Starship to the red planet as early as next year. NASA also wants to use the Starship vehicle to send crew and cargo to the moon, and a modified version of the Starship spacecraft will be used to put NASA astronauts on the lunar surface in the Artemis III mission, currently set for 2027.

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Watch this SpaceX rocket launch on 15th anniversary of first Falcon 9 liftoff
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches on the 15th anniversary of the first Falcon 9 launch.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket roared skyward on Wednesday on what was also the 15th anniversary of the first-ever Falcon 9 launch.

The anniversary mission launched from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, deploying 27 Starlink internet satellites to low-Earth orbit.

Read more
SpaceX wants to send humans to Mars by 2028, here’s why it won’t
The Starship rocket on the launchpad.

This week saw another dramatic test of SpaceX's Starship, when the mighty rocket exploded once again, and both the upper and lower stages were lost. The test wasn't a complete failure, as the upper stage did reach space for the first time, but it's clear that there's still a lot of work to do to make the world's most powerful rocket something that can be relied on for its eventual intended use: carrying crew to Mars.

Undaunted by this latest setback, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced in a talk shared yesterday, May 29, that the company would be sending "millions of people" to Mars, in order to create a "self-sustaining civilization" there. The aim, Musk says, is to launch a Starship to Mars by 2026, and if that goes well, then to launch a crewed mission two years later, in late 2028 or early 2029.

Read more
After Starship’s 9th test, astronaut shares unique view of earlier flights
SpaceX's Starship on its sixth flight, as seen from the space station.

SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket roared skyward for the ninth time on Tuesday, with the test flight delivering mixed results.

The upper-stage Starship spacecraft coasted for around 40 minutes before breaking up on reentry, a performance that beat the seventh and eighth tests when the vehicles broke up soon after stage separation. The first-stage Super Heavy booster, meanwhile, exploded on its descent, though SpaceX had said beforehand that this could happen as it was trying out a new system for the return flight that put extra pressure on the booster.

Read more