Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX has announced its plans to send a Starship rocket into orbit later this year. This will be the first SpaceX rocket to be sent to orbit, and the launch is meant to serve as a demonstration for NASA.
"We track four major Starship flights. The first one here is coming up in December, part of early December," NASA's senior official overseeing development of the Artemis moon program, Mark Kirasich, said during a NASA Advisory Council meeting.
SpaceX hopes to prove that it can be trusted to send NASA astronauts to the moon in the coming years. As of now, Musk's space company has only launched prototypes of the upper half of the Starship spacecraft to a height of around six miles for landing demonstration purposes.
The 160-foot Starship rocket will be launched into orbit by SpaceX's 230-foot Super Heavy booster. If all goes as planned, the booster will land again following the launch, and the Starship will spend around 90 minutes in orbit before a splashdown in the ocean off the coast of Hawaii. This will be the first time the full system is being tested.
Prior to the Starship, SpaceX's top rocket system was its reusable Falcon 9.
SpaceX has more work to do before it can carry out the launch. There are still more ground tests and reviews that need to be completed, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) hasn't given the company a license for the mission. The testing and approval process could push the launch into 2023.
The FAA says it will only consider granting Musk's company a license "after SpaceX provides all outstanding information and the agency can fully analyze it."
In 2021, SpaceX signed a $3 billion contract with NASA to send astronauts to the moon in its Starship rocket. While the mission is scheduled for 2025, the spaceflight testing process could also delay that launch.
SpaceX was competing for the NASA contract against two other corporate giants, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin and defense contractor Dynetics. Blue Origin legally challenged NASA's decision to pick SpaceX, but the challenge failed.