SpaceX has rolled Ship 37 and Super Heavy Booster 16 to the pad at Starbase, Texas, and fully stacked the hardware for Starship’s tenth integrated test flight. The company now targets a 6:45 p.m. CT (23:45 UTC) liftoff on Sunday, within a 60-minute window that opens at 6:30 p.m. CT. Weather forecasters put the odds of acceptable conditions at about 45 percent, but propellant loading has begun as SpaceX proceeds toward launch. Flight 10 is designed to gather data crucial to making the nearly 400-foot-tall vehicle rapidly reusable. After stage separation, the 232-foot Super Heavy booster will attempt a soft water landing in the Gulf of Mexico, intentionally disabling one of its three landing engines to test backup capability. The Starship upper stage intends to deploy eight mass simulators the size of Starlink satellites, reignite a Raptor engine in space, and then brave a high-stress atmospheric re-entry over the Indian Ocean with sections of heat-shield tiles deliberately removed or replaced by experimental metallic versions. Sunday’s mission follows three Starship mishaps earlier this year—two explosions shortly after liftoff and the loss of the vehicle in space during May’s Flight 9—as well as a ground-test blast in June. A successful demonstration would mark progress toward NASA’s plan to use a modified Starship for a crewed lunar landing as early as 2027 and toward SpaceX’s goal of launching heavier next-generation Starlink satellites. The company’s iterative, test-to-failure approach puts added scrutiny on Flight 10, which is expected to last a little over an hour from launch to splashdown.
Watch: Starship Megarocket Prepares For 10th Test Flight https://t.co/ih7KAZukPz
Propellant load is underway for Starship Flight 10, targeting liftoff at 6:45:01pm CT https://t.co/3SJcAJyVVz
Starship Flight 10 is go for Propellant Load with less then an hour to go until the planned liftoff at 19:45:00 ET / 23:45 UTC @NASASpaceflight launch stream: https://t.co/QNFqfd8Yp5 https://t.co/cZsA1xWdeT