Starship is rolling to the launchpad ready to fly – it will be the first time, SpaceX tries to recover the booster, catching it with a pair of oversized "chopsticks".

SpaceX will launch the enormous Starship aloft Sunday within a launch window opening at 5 AM PST (7 AM local time) from the company's Starbase facility in southeast Texas. This is the fifth test flight in the Starship development program-although this one has come a bit sooner than earlier expected: the Federal Aviation Administration had said it did not anticipate issuing a modified launch license for the test before late November.

That timeline was a source of much affront to SpaceX, prompting the company to repeatedly point out what it branded as the regulator's inefficiency. But the world's most powerful launcher will, in fact take to the skies sooner than many had expected after all, with the FAA announcing on Saturday that it had approved the launch for tomorrow.

The regulator said in a statement that the FAA has found that SpaceX met all the requirements for safety, environmental, and other licensing requirements for the suborbital test flight. Another welcome boon is that the authorization clears the way for the next test flight: since "the changes requested by SpaceX for Flight 6 are within the scope of what has been previously analyzed," according to the FAA.

The nearly 400-foot tall Starship, at the heart of what SpaceX says is its stated ambition to make life multi-planetary - but more immediately, it's for NASA's ambitious Artemis campaign to return humans to the surface of the moon. SpaceX envisions rapid reuse of the entire Starship vehicle, which includes an upper stage (also called Starship) and a Super Heavy booster - but that means proving out the capability to recover both stages and quickly refurbish them for future flights.

So it is fitting that the two objectives for the fifth test flight are a kind of double whammy: completing the first "catch" of the Super Heavy booster at the launch site and an on-target Starship re-entry and splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

That is accomplished: SpaceX successfully nailed a controlled reentry and splashdown of its Starship upper stage during the last test mission in June. The booster catch, as the company put it in a blog post however, would "be singly novel in rocketry history".

The closest analogue is the now-routine Falcon 9 booster landings on autonomous barges and terrestrial landing zones. But for tomorrow's launch, the plan is for the booster to slow to a hover and gently position itself inside the zone of two "chopstick" arms attached to the launch tower. Those arms would then close around the booster and hold it up after its engines stop firing.

According to an update on its website, SpaceX said the thousands of criteria indicating healthy systems throughout the vehicle and pad have to be met prior to the catch attempt happening. When these are obtained, the mission's Flight Director will give a manual command to the booster before the end of a trajectory-altering maneuver known as a boostback burn around 3 minutes and 40 seconds after the liftoff.

If the command isn't received before the boostback burn is complete, or if automated health checks determine unacceptable conditions with Super Heavy or the tower, the booster will automatically default to a trajectory that lands it and splashes down softly in the Gulf of Mexico, the company said.

The entire thrust of Starship on its return trip and leaving should be but 7 minutes. Once Starship separates from the first stage, it will continue to ascent into an orbit and splash down into the Indian Ocean about an hour after liftoff.

But while waiting for this launch license, SpaceX engineers have kept themselves quite busy: in the past few months alone, they have performed numerous tests on the launch tower, completely replaced the rocket's entire thermal protection system with newer tiles and a backup ablative layer, and updated the ship's software for reentry. This week, engineers conducted propellant loading tests, as well as testing the launch pad's water deluge system that is intended to protect the pad from the powerful fire of the booster's 33 Raptor engines."
The firm eventually plans on bringing the Starship upper stage back to the landing site, too, although we'll have to wait to see that in future test launches.

With each flight layering on the learnings from the last, testing improvements in hardware and operations across every aspect of Starship, we are at the point where we will demonstrate techniques integral to Starship's fully and rapidly reusable design," the company says. "By continuing to push our hardware in a flight environment, and doing so as safely and frequently as possible, we'll rapidly bring Starship online and revolutionize humanity's ability to access space.".

Live webcasts will begin approximately 30 minutes before liftoff or around 7 a.m. PST on SpaceX's website, and on X.