SpaceX is targeting its 11th test flight of its Starship rocket in mid-October, the company announced on Monday (29/9).
The launch is scheduled for October 13th at the earliest, with the launch window opening at 6:15 PM Central Time (06:15 AM WIB) on October 14th.
The test will see the booster rocket fired with 24 flight-proven Raptor engines to test a unique landing burn configuration planned for future Super Heavy rockets. The booster will target an offshore landing point in the Gulf of Mexico instead of returning to the launch site for capture, SpaceX said.
The Starship upper stage will attempt several targets in space, including launching eight Starlink simulators similar in size to the company's next-generation Starlink satellites. The simulators will follow the same suborbital trajectory as Starship and are expected to burn up upon re-entry.
The mission will also include a series of experiments and operational changes aimed at paving the way for future Starship flights to return the upper stage to the launch site. For this test, several heat shield plates were removed to test the spacecraft's re-entry susceptibility.
To replicate the mission's trajectory back to SpaceX's Starbase in the US state of Texas, the final phase of the test will feature a dynamic banking maneuver and evaluate subsonic guidance algorithms before executing a landing burn and splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
