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SpaceX Starship Flight 9 launching on May 28: How to watch live

This time, the Starship's upper stage will repeat its suborbital trajectory and try to complete the objective that it couldn't achieve in earlier failed test flights.

File photo of SpaceX's next-generation Starship spacecraft, atop its powerful Super Heavy rocket, lifting off on its third launch from the company's Boca Chica launchpad on an uncrewed test flight, near Brownsville, Texas. (Reuters)

SpaceX has announced that it will be launching the Starship megarocket on Tuesday, May 27 at 7:30 PM EDT, which corresponds to Wednesday, May 28 at 5 AM IST. The Starship Flight 9 launch, as it’s called, will be taking off from SpaceX’s Starbase site near Boca Chica in South Texas.

While this will be SpaceX’s ninth attempt at launching the giant Starship rocket, it will be the first time the company will try to reuse the giant Super Heavy booster, which is the first stage of the flight. SpaceX says it has replaced the single-use parts, but is reusing 29 of the booster’s 33 Raptor engines.

Instead of the Super Heavy booster returning to the launch site, it looks like this time it will be making a splash in the ocean. Also, Starship’s upper stage will try to deploy the dummy Starlink satellite, with SpaceX looking forward to the flight to test “several experiments focused on enabling Starship’s upper stage to return to the launch site.”

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SpaceX says the Super Heavy will also “fly a variety of experiments aimed at generating data to improve performance and reliability on future boosters”. This time, the Starship’s upper stage will repeat its suborbital trajectory and try to complete the objective that it couldn’t achieve in earlier failed test flights.

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One of the hallmarks of SpaceX’s business model is its reusable booster. It took seven years for SpaceX to reuse the booster from Falcon 9 that took off in 2010 as part of the first orbital launch. The upcoming launch comes after the previous Flight 7 and Flight 8 failed launches earlier this year in January and March. On those launches, SpaceX was successfully able to land the Super Heavy booster back to Earth, but the Ship stage of the rocket had failed to liftoff.

How to watch SpaceX Starship’s ninth flight test live?

Like always, SpaceX will be livestreaming the launch around 30 minutes before Starship launch. You can either tune in to the live stream from the SpaceX website, watch it on the company’s official X handle or check out the YouTube video below.

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