Live updates: SpaceX prepares to launch third spaceship flight

The vehicle flew twice last year from a SpaceX launch site in Boca Chica, Texas, along the Gulf of Mexico coast. Both flights ended within minutes, resulting in explosive events, providing useful data for SpaceX engineers looking to complete a full mission.

During this third trip, SpaceX hopes to achieve better performance for the rocket, reaching higher altitudes and perhaps even speeds that could put the vehicle into orbit.

Here’s what else you need to know about the flight:

• The launch is scheduled no earlier than 8 a.m. Eastern Time. There is a window of 110 minutes in which the flight could start, so the company could start later, as is often the case during test flights.

• The flight becomes streamed live on the X website, which is also owned by SpaceX founder Elon Musk. The New York Times will also publish a livestream on this blog.

• The Starship system consists of two stages: the Super Heavy rocket booster and the upper stage spacecraft, also known as Starship. The company wants both to be fully reusable in the future.

• SpaceX’s second Starship flight, on Nov. 18, reached several milestones, including an in-flight procedure called hot staging, in which the upper stage engines begin firing before the booster stage decays. But the rocket’s Super Heavy booster stage exploded shortly after separating from the spacecraft’s upper stage, which also exploded minutes later, about 90 miles above the Atlantic Ocean.

• Thursday’s flight, which will last just over an hour, will attempt even more new milestones in space before the spacecraft’s upper stage attempts to crash into the Indian Ocean.

• A successful test flight would provide strong validation for the Starship system design, but more test flights will be needed before SpaceX can land a spacecraft on the moon, let alone Mars.