What time will SpaceX’s Starship Flight 13 launch today? Timetable, live broadcast, test goals
SpaceX will try Starship’s 13th flight test On Thursday, July 23, the company continued testing the world’s most powerful rocket after a failed launch attempt last week.
The launch window is scheduled to open at 5:45 PM Central Time (6:45 PM Eastern Time) and will remain open for 90 minutes. space exploration technologies corp. said its webcast will begin about 30 minutes before liftoff on its website and official X account. The company warned that the schedule could change based on weather or technical conditions.
The SpaceX founder said the mission followed a launch failure on July 16 when several engines failed to ignite during startup, triggering automatic purges. Elon Musk.
What was the goal of Starship Flight 13?
According to SpaceX, Flight 13 will revisit several goals from previous tests while introducing new milestones, including the first deployment of 20 next-generation Starlink V3 satellites.
The Super Heavy booster will attempt a successful launch, stage separation, boost burn and controlled landing at an offshore location in the Gulf of America. Meanwhile, the Starship upper stage is expected to deploy satellites, restart a single Raptor engine in space, and complete a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
Starlink V3 satellites are designed to increase network capacity and internet speeds. As part of the test, they will expand their solar arrays and antennas and attempt to communicate with the wider Starlink constellation using high-capacity laser links before re-entering Earth’s atmosphere and burning up approximately 20 minutes after deployment.
What’s different since the last Starship test?
SpaceX said it has made a number of hardware and software modifications after the problems encountered on Flight 12.
On that mission, differences in engine startup caused the Super Heavy booster to rotate incorrectly during a rollover maneuver. Five of its 33 engines also failed to re-ignite during boost combustion, preventing the exercise from being completed as planned.
The company has since updated the engine startup sequence, improved engine reignition hardware and improved onboard software aimed at making the booster more reliable during flight.
On the previous mission, one of the starship’s upper stage’s three vacuum-optimized Raptor engines shut down for about 40 seconds after stage separation, so a propulsion system upgrade was also performed. While the vehicle still reached its planned suborbital orbit, SpaceX said the changes were intended to improve engine reliability on future flights.
In addition, six of the 20 Starlink satellites will carry cameras to photograph the starship’s heat shield during flight. Engineers are also painting several heat shields white to simulate missing ones and test inspection techniques to support future missions back to the launch site.
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“What sets us apart from many other companies is that we test fast and test frequently, and that includes launches,” Tim Southerton, director of Starship launch engineering at SpaceX, said in the company’s documentary “Critical Path.”
The latest test is a step toward SpaceX’s long-term goal of developing a fully reusable rocket capable of supporting NASA’s Artemis mission to the moon and eventually human missions to Mars.
