Monday morning is the current target for SpaceX’s Starship to have its first orbital launch. Starship will be the first vehicle to land humans on the moon in Artemis 3. You may be asking what was all that hullabaloo about Orion then? Well Orion is astronauts’ ride to the vicinity of the Moon at which point they will dock to Starship and those heading to the lunar surface will switch vehicles. Starship is an instrumental part of landing the first woman and person of color on the Moon and this launch will be a giant leap closer toward achieving that goal.
The launch window opens at 8:00am EDT (12:00 UTC) Monday April 17th and closes 2.5 hours later at 10:30am EDT. 9:28am EDT (13:28 UTC) Tuesday April 20th and closes 62 min later at 10:30 am EDT (14:30 UTC). You can tune in live to the SpaceX official stream which is scheduled to begin at 8:45am EDT (12:45 UTC). This past weekend SpaceX finally got FAA approval so whether Starship goes or not will just be dependent on the health of the rocket and the conditions during the launch window.
Something to remember SpaceX’s philosophy is to build and test early so if this launch does not work out, it doesn’t mean that our hopes of going to the Moon are over. Actually, many of the Starship’s tests up until this point resulted in pretty large explosions that you should definitely check out here.
Happy Exploring!
Also, this is the vehicle I actually work on for my day job so I am extra excited for this particular launch.
Last thing, there are other streams covering the broadcast. If you don’t necessarily want to stick with the SpaceX one, you can check out NASA Spaceflight’s which I have used when there wasn’t a SpaceX stream (like during the static fire tests).
