Live coverage: SpaceX to launch its Starship rocket on its fourth test flight

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 For a fourth time in a little more than a year, SpaceX is preparing to launch a test mission of its massive Starship rocket from its development facility in southern Texas called Starbase. The launch, dubbed Flight 4, will push the launch vehicle towards its goal of being a mostly reusable rocket.

Similarly to the previous three launches, Flight 4 will not include a payload and will fly a suborbital trajectory. Liftoff is set for 7:50 a.m. CDT (8:50 a.m. EDT, 1250 UTC), near the opening of a 120-minute window.

Spaceflight Now will have joint live coverage alongside LabPadre beginning at 7:00 a.m. EDT (1100 UTC).

On Wednesday, SpaceX stacked the Ship upper stage (Ship 29) on top of the Super Heavy Booster (Booster 11) to create the 121 m (397 ft) Starship rocket. Both components will be expended as a result of the flight, but the way SpaceX structured the mission, it hopes this will demonstrate their future reuse capabilities.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter) on June 1, SpaceX founder Elon Musk stated that “the main goal of this mission is to get much deeper into the atmosphere during reentry, ideally through max heating.”


During Flight 3, the upper stage began to roll uncontrollably, preventing the vehicle from performing a relight of one of its six Raptor engines. However, thanks to its ability to connect to the Starlink satellite internet network, another part of SpaceX’s business, the rocket was able to stream back high definition camera views showing its reentry through a blanket of plasma.

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