SpaceX launching Starship Flight 7 today: Watch it live

SpaceX is set to launch the seventh test flight of its Starship megarocket today (Jan. 15), and you can watch the action live.

The 400-foot-tall (122 meters) Starship is scheduled to lift off from SpaceX’s Starbase site in South Texas today at 5 p.m. EST (2200 GMT; 4 p.m. local Texas time).

You can watch the action live here at Space.com courtesy of SpaceX, or directly via the company. Coverage will begin about 35 minutes before launch.

Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. It consists of two stages, both of which are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable: a giant booster called Super Heavy and a 165-foot-tall (50 meters) spacecraft known as Starship, or simply Ship.

Related: SpaceX’s Starship Flight 7 test flight will deploy simulated Starlink satellites for 1st time

Starship has flown six times to date — twice in 2023 and in March, June, October and November of last year. October’s mission featured an unprecedented catch of Super Heavy by the launch tower’s “chopstick” arms — a feat SpaceX wants to repeat on today’s flight.

But the company plans to do something new on Flight 7 as well: If all goes according to plan, Ship will deploy 10 mock versions of SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites. These dummy spacecraft won’t stay in space for long; they’ll follow Ship’s trajectory, splashing down in the Indian Ocean about an hour after liftoff. (SpaceX eventually plans to catch Ship with the chopstick arms but will not try to do so on Flight 7.)

Today’s flight will likely be the first of many for Starship in 2025; SpaceX plans to make serious progress on the megarocket in the coming weeks and months.

“This new year will be transformational for Starship, with the goal of bringing reuse of the entire system online and flying increasingly ambitious missions as we iterate towards being able to send humans and cargo to Earth orbit, the moon and Mars,” SpaceX wrote in a Flight 7 mission preview.

Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, “Out There,” was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.