BOCA CHICA, TEXAS — SpaceX has filed plans to launch its huge Super Heavy booster together with its Starship spaceship, as part of the first orbital test of the Starship. <br /><br />This marks an exciting new development in SpaceX's efforts to deliver the first astronauts to the surface of the Moon since 1972. This moon mission is part of a contract with NASA, and here are the details:<br /><br />The Verge reports that SpaceX has filed an application with the FCC, outlining its plans for the first orbital test flight of its Starship spaceship within a year. <br /><br />Going orbital is a key stepping stone towards sending the first humans to the Moon since the Apollo missions. <br /><br />To get that high, Starship's Super Heavy booster, a gigantic 70-meter rocket stage, will help it take off from SpaceX's facilities in South Texas. <br /><br />The orbital flight test would mark the first time SpaceX stacks both elements of its massive Starship system together. <br /><br />The booster stage will separate approximately 170 seconds into flight, and will then perform a partial return and land in the Gulf of Mexico approximately 32 kilometers from the shore. <br /><br />Meanwhile, Starship will fly over the Florida Strait and continue into orbit, nearly completing a full trip around Earth before plunging back through the atmosphere over Hawaii, roughly 90 minutes after launching from Texas. <br /><br />SpaceX says the landing would be a "powered, targeted landing" about 100 kiloometers off the northwest coast of Kauai in what it calls a "soft ocean landing."<br /><br />The Elon Musk-led company says it's hoping to "collect as much data as possible during flight — to quantify entry dynamics and better understand what the vehicle experiences in a flight regime — which is extremely difficult to accurately predict or replicate computationally."
