After several disappointing failures, SpaceX’s Starship — the mammoth rocket that Elon Musk hopes to use to take people to Mars — is back on the launchpad for a 10th test flight on Sunday night.
The test is highly important for Mr. Musk and SpaceX, which hopes to show that the spacecraft is capable of achieving key goals. It’s also critical for NASA, which needs Starship to land its astronauts on the moon.
“The stakes are the highest they’ve ever been for a Starship launch,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank. But it is not quite a “make or break” moment, he added.
“If they have another failure, they still have more room to continue iterating and trying, but they are running out of room,” Mr. Harrison said.
When is the launch, and how can I watch?
The launch is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday from SpaceX’s Starbase site in southern Texas, near Brownsville. If weather or technical issues arise, the liftoff could be pushed back up to an hour before the launch attempt would need to be called off. On Saturday, SpaceX said there was a 55 percent chance the weather would be unfavorable for launch.
SpaceX plans to provide live coverage of the test flight on its website, starting 30 minutes before launch.
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