Iran Press/ America: The uncrewed launch was scheduled to take place during a 20-minute window beginning at 7 a.m. CST (1300 GMT) at SpaceX's Starbase site on the Gulf of Mexico near Boca Chica. Starship is mounted atop its towering Super Heavy rocket booster in what will be the second attempted flight of both vehicles together.
The mission's objective is to get Starship off the ground in Texas and into space just shy of reaching orbit, then plunge through Earth's atmosphere for a splashdown off Hawaii's coast. The launch had been scheduled for Friday but was pushed back by a day for a last-minute swap of flight-control hardware.
A successful test flight would mark a key step toward achieving SpaceX's ambition of producing a large, multi-purpose, spacecraft capable of sending people and cargo back to the moon later this decade for NASA, and ultimately to Mars.
Elon Musk - SpaceX's founder, chief executive, and chief engineer - also sees Starship as eventually replacing the company's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket as the centerpiece of its launch business that already lofts most of the world's satellites and other commercial payloads into space.
NASA, SpaceX's primary customer, has a considerable stake in the success of Starship, which the US space agency is counting on to play a central role in its human spaceflight program, Artemis, successor to the Apollo missions of more than a half-century ago that put astronauts on the moon for the first time.
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