If the launch of Starship is successful, it will be a critical milestone in Elon Musk’s quest to bring humans to destinations as far away as Mars.

This particular launch has been nearly two decades in the making. As early as 2005, Musk hinted at plans to build a giant rocket.

Though the precise plans for the vehicle have changed over time, its purpose has remained the same: landing people on other worlds and fulfilling Musk’s dream of a human settlement on the Red Planet.

"Starship is the first vehicle that is really able to execute on Musk’s vision of making humanity multi-planetary," said Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Analytics, a space consulting firm, according to an article by Bloomberg.

Once it becomes operational, Starship will be the most powerful rocket humanity has ever built, carrying gargantuan payloads to Earth orbit and beyond. Its power and size make it a critical part of SpaceX’s future, with the capability of launching massive satellites and large crews of spacefarers.

Nasa has plans to use the rocket as part of its own strategy to return to the moon after awarding SpaceX a $2,9 billion contract to help the agency get there, reports CNN. Starship is also designed to be fully reusable, making its operation relatively inexpensive.

Before any of these big dreams can come true, SpaceX needs to prove Starship can actually fly.

Standing at more than 120 metres tall, Starship is a behemoth, bigger than the Saturn V rocket that took astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s.

It’s also destined to be the most powerful, able to lift between 150 to 250 tonnes of cargo into Earth orbit. SpaceX’s most powerful rocket in operation at the moment, the Falcon Heavy, can only carry 64 metric tonnes into orbit. Starship will allow heavier payloads, like SpaceX’s new, larger Starlink satellites, to make it into space. Elon Musk has also said it could carry up to 100 passengers at once.

No people or cargo will be on board for Starship’s first test flight.

On Monday, during a window that begins at 07:00 local time, SpaceX will attempt to launch Starship from the company’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas, where the company has been mass-producing prototypes of Starship for the last five years.

Less than three minutes after launch, the Super Heavy booster will separate from Starship and fall back to Earth for a controlled landing in the Gulf of Mexico. There it will sink to the ocean floor, with no plans for recovery. According to the BBC, testing Super Heavy’s reusability will come in later tests.

Once separated from Super Heavy, Starship will ignite its own engines, propelling Starship deeper into space where it will reach near-orbital speeds. About nine and a half minutes after launch, Starship’s engines will cut off, and the vehicle will cruise around the Earth, reaching a peak altitude of roughly 235 km, well into space.

Starship won’t do a complete orbit around the Earth. About 225 km off the coast of Hawaii, the vehicle will come back through the planet’s atmosphere and splash down in the Pacific Ocean.

This wonky test is meant to prove a few key things: that Starship and Super Heavy can separate from each other as planned and that Starship is capable of reaching orbital velocities and then returning back to Earth.

UPDATE:

Teams are working towards Thursday, April 20 for the first flight test of a fully integrated Starship and Super Heavy rocket ? https://t.co/bG5tsCUanp pic.twitter.com/umcqhJCGai

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 17, 2023

OFM News (Sources: BBC/CNN/Bloomberg)