Overview

• Liftoff is scheduled for 23:30 GMT from SpaceX’s Starbase site in Texas for the vehicle’s tenth test mission.
• The company plans upper-stage experiments that include heat-shield testing, deployment of mock satellites, and an engine relight.
• SpaceX intends to end the mission with a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean and will not attempt a mechanical arm recovery.
• The latest sortie follows three troubled flights this year—two early upper-stage explosions that scattered debris over Caribbean areas and a May loss tied to a fuel leak—plus a June ground-test blast.
• Regulators have cleared a higher Starship launch cadence as pressure builds over reliability and potential knock-on effects for NASA’s Artemis schedule.