The Starship has no people on board during the test flight. SpaceX hopes that one day it will take 100 passengers to space at the same time. The rocket is almost 120 meters high. That is 10 meters higher than the Saturn V, the rocket that took people to the moon and back between 1968 and 1972. The newest rocket is also twice as high as the space shuttles and almost three times as high as the Soyuz rocket that took Dutch astronaut André Kuipers to space.
The Starship had to be launched on Monday somewhere between 2 and 4:30 pm Dutch time. That would happen from SpaceX’s own space base in the US state of Texas, on the border with Mexico. The lower part is the 70 meter long Super Heavy booster, with the motors that must ensure that the rocket takes off. When that work is done, the launcher will splash into the Gulf of Mexico.
The 50-meter Starship capsule, which people will later have to sit in, then flies on. It covers the Atlantic Ocean, southern Africa, the Indian Ocean, Indonesia and the Pacific Ocean. After an hour and a half and almost a complete circle around the earth, he must land in a controlled manner in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.
