The SpaceX Starship rocket, considered the most powerful ever built and which eventually will be used to take humans to the moon and Mars, was approved Friday for a license to launch by federal regulators.
The Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses commercial rocket launches, said it granted the company's request for an uncrewed flight test of the rocket from SpaceX's facilities east of Brownsville, Texas, near the Mexican border.
"After a comprehensive license evaluation process, the FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy, payload, airspace integration, and financial responsibility requirements," the FAA said in a statement, CNN reported.
"SpaceX is targeting as soon as Monday, April 17, for the first flight test of a fully integrated Starship and Super Heavy rocket from Starbase in Texas," the company said on its website. "The 150-minute test window will open at 7:00 a.m. CDT."
SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk tweeted: "Success maybe, excitement guaranteed!"
SpaceX said it refers to the Super Heavy rocket and Starship spacecraft as "Starship." NASA has contracted with SpaceX to use the Starship rocket to lead its Artemis missions taking astronauts to the moon to build a base and to Mars.
Once fully operational, Starship will be capable of carrying 100 to 150 tons of cargo into orbit. SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket has a payload capacity of 22 tons. The Super Heavy rocket booster will use 33 Raptor engines filled with subcooled liquid methane and liquid oxygen and will generate more than 16.5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, twice as much as the Falcon 9's Merlin engine.
The company said the Starship rocket "is a fully reusable transportation system designed to carry crew and cargo to Earth's orbit, help humanity return to the Moon, and travel to Mars and beyond."
In Monday's test launch, the Super Heavy rocket booster will fall into the Gulf of Mexico after first-stage separation, but in future flights, SpaceX said it plans to guide the booster back to an upright landing at the launch site. The Starship spacecraft will complete nearly a full lap of Earth, ending its flight with a splashdown off Hawaii. SpaceX will not try to recover the spacecraft.
"With a test such as this, success is measured by how much we can learn, which will inform and improve the probability of success in the future as SpaceX rapidly advances development of Starship," the company said.
SpaceX said it has completed multiple suborbital flight tests of the Starship's upper stage.
"The flight tests helped validate the vehicle's design, proving Starship can fly through the subsonic phase of entry before relighting its engines and flipping itself to a vertical configuration for landing," the company said.
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