Toggle light / dark theme

After years of prototype testing, crash landings, and explosions, the Super Heavy booster and Starship second stage are ready for the inaugural flight. This test flight will pave way for future missions to the Moon and Mars, but first, SpaceX must get Starship off the ground.

Due to the nature of this test flight, the launch date and time are fickle and subject to great change as SpaceX will take all precautions necessary to ensure Starship/SuperHeavy collects as much data as possible during its flight.

The vehicles set to perform this inaugural test flight are Booster 7 and Ship 24. The last ship to complete a test flight was SN15, which survived its short suborbital test hop. All of the prior ships and boosters are detailed in the History section of this article. For a comprehensive log of all testing done on Ship 24 and Booster 7, check out our Starship Orbital Launch Timeline Checklist [S24 and B7] | Live Updates article!

Bootprints have not been left on the Moon since the early 1970s, but that will soon change. With NASA’s Artemis and China’s CLEP programs both scheduled to return humans to the Moon before 2030, the two superpowers are apparently in a “race” to the Lunar surface. But this time, who gets there “first” matters little. Instead, this race is about building a sustainable human presence on the Moon.

Here is how China’s and America’s approaches differ, and what it means for the future of spaceflight and human progress.


A comparison of the hardware China and the US are developing to return humans to the Moon.

After almost two years of waiting for Elon Musk’s Mars rocket to fly again, things are really starting to move quickly now, it seems.

The Super Heavy first stage booster section of Starship was moved to the launch site over the weekend and now the Federal Aviation Administration lists Monday, April 10 as the target launch date for Starship in its current Operations Plan Advisory for air traffic controllers.

The advisory also lists next Tuesday and Wednesday as potential backup launch dates.

The FAA has Starship on their launch calendar! The biggest step towards colonizing Mars is perhaps a week away. But the question remains: why are humans going to make the choice to spend the rest of their lives on such a hostile planet? Well, for the main reasons that humans do anything.
Money.
#space #spacex #nasa.

Please support my channel! EARLY VIDEO RELEASES, DISCORD MEMBERSHIP AND EXCLUSIVE CONTENT PLUS 15% OFF MERCH!
https://www.patreon.com/AngryAstronaut.
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/AngryAstro.

The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin.
https://space.nss.org/the-case-for-colonizing-mars-by-robert-zubrin/

https://www.youtube.com/@spaceboffin.
https://www.youtube.com/@NickHenning3D

A spaceship traveling at warp speed wouldn’t be firing its engines to travel that fast; it’s just being carried by a spacetime bubble. Then if you want to exponentially increase your speed, you build another bubble around that bubble, which in the world of Star Trek is referred to as warp factor two, and then warp factor three, Macdonald says.

Spacetime as we know it is finite, and as such, there is a limit to the number of warp bubbles, or level of warp speed one could theoretically reach. In some shows, this is arbitrarily called warp factor 10, which is when all of spacetime is wrapped around the spaceship. At that point, “you’ve broken all the laws of infinity and you experience all time at all moments,” Macdonald says. “And in the classic Voyager episode of Star Trek, you evolve into lizard people.”

An artificial black hole produced using sound waves and a dielectric medium has been created in the lab, according to researchers with an international think tank featuring more than 30 Ph.D. research scientists from around the world.

The researchers say their discovery is significantly more cost-effective and efficient than current methods in use by researchers who want to simulate the effects of a black hole in a laboratory environment.

New York-based Applied Physics first achieved recognition with the 2021 publication of a peer-reviewed theoretical paper detailing the mathematics behind the construction of a physical warp drive. More recently, the organization published a method for using Cal Tech’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) to detect the use of warp drives in outer space, co-authored by Dr. Manfred Paulini, the Associate Dean of Physics at Carnegie Mellon University.