SpaceX is ready for the second launch of its Moon and Mars Rocket spacecraft

SpaceX is gearing up for the second test flight of Starship, the giant rocket being built to take NASA astronauts to the surface of the moon and Elon Musk’s ambitions to Mars. The Federal Aviation Administration approved the launch on Wednesday and attempted it on Friday morning.

Here’s what you need to know about the launch.

When is the launch and how can I watch it?

The spaceship will launch from Boca Chica, Texas, a location on the Gulf of Mexico coast near the city of Brownsville that SpaceX has nicknamed Starbase.

The flight could depart as early as 8 a.m. Eastern time on Friday. SpaceX will stream the launch live on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter that is also owned by Mr. Musk.

There is a two-hour window in which SpaceX could launch. Test missions often start later in a launch window while flight managers ensure systems function as designed.

If the flight is fully successful, Starship will complete a partial circumnavigation of Earth before belly-flopping into the Pacific Ocean off the island of Kauai.

What is starship?

For NASA, Starship is a future lunar lander for astronauts under the Artemis missions. But for Mr Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, the vehicle is central to his vision of ferrying colonists to the red planet. That means Starship has to be big.

Stacked atop what SpaceX calls a Super Heavy booster, the Starship rocket system will be, by almost every measure, the largest and most powerful yet.

It is the tallest rocket ever built: 110 meters high, or almost 30 meters taller than the Statue of Liberty including the pedestal.

It is designed to be completely reusable. The Super Heavy booster will land similar to those for SpaceX’s smaller Falcon 9 rockets, and Starship will be able to return from space while flopping through the atmosphere like a sky diver before turning to a vertical position for landing.

What went wrong on the first Starship flight?

First there was the huge brown cloud that spread outward from beneath the rocket as the engines fired up. It contained dirt, rocks and even boulder-sized concrete blocks, which were lifted from under the launch pad by the force of the rocket’s impact.

And as Starship rose into the sky, it tilted to the side. Three of the booster’s 33 engines had not started and the unbalanced thrust caused the lopsided ascent.

Starship reached the launch tower and for much of the next minute the flight seemed to be going well. But there were signs that more was going wrong. Cameras aimed at the bottom of the Starship appeared to show that six of the engines had failed. The booster was supposed to separate from the upper stage 2 minutes and 52 seconds into the flight, but that never happened. Instead, Starship began to slowly tumble, and a minute later explosives intended to destroy a missile that had drifted off course exploded.

A week later, Musk provided preliminary answers about what went wrong during a question-and-answer session on Twitter, now called X.

“There are some good news stories here,” he said. “The structural margins of the vehicle seem better than we expected,” referring to the moments of the flight. “The vehicle actually does somersaults towards the end and still remains intact,” he said.

What did SpaceX change for this spaceship flight?

At first glance, the Starship rocket on Friday’s launch pad looks like the same hulking vehicle that launched in April. It’s not.

The biggest change is something called ‘hot firing’. The Starship’s upper stage engines will ignite while the booster is still attached and some booster engines will still fire, potentially improving the rocket’s performance.

SpaceX also made changes to the rocket design to prevent fuel leaks and fires, and it made improvements to the flight termination system that took far too long to destroy the spaceship.

To prevent the rocket motors from destroying the concrete below and sending up another cloud of debris and dust, SpaceX added a structure consisting of two plates with holes in the top plate. “Basically it’s a massive, super-strong steel shower head that points upwards,” Musk said.

Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water sprayed upward from this system will act as a cushion, absorbing the heat and power of the rocket engines and protecting the steel and concrete.