How to watch SpaceX Starship’s third test launch

Thursday morning SpaceX will be attempting its third Starship test launch. This has the biggest hope of being a 100% successful flight but how do you watch it? Here are the details below.

Update: SpaceX launched Starship Thursday morning (March 14, 2024).

SpaceX is all in on X streaming

Ever since Elon Musk finished his purchase of Twitter last year, SpaceX has stopped live coverage of its launches on YouTube. Which sucks for a lot of people that want to watch the official stream on larger screens as it’s much harder to get a X (formally Twitter) stream casted to a TV.

With that said, the official SpaceX stream will be hosted on X at the company’s official profile @SpaceX and on the company’s website. Expect coverage to begin 30 minutes before liftoff, which is currently scheduled at 7:00 A.M. CT. However, if the stream starts and there is a delay, the stream won’t end but it will probably get pretty quiet. Starship launch coverage is usually much more tamer than Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and especially Crew Dragon coverage.

Sadly, because this is not a NASA related mission, even if Starship will be used on the agency’s Artemis Program, you will not see coverage on NASA TV. However, there will be plenty of unofficial launch streams by outside parties.

Another option will be Everyday Astronaut, Tim Dodd has been covering SpaceX’s development down there since the very beginning. Dodd not just being an expert in spaceflight (even if he won’t say it himself) he is also the best option for family friendly coverage and is great at answering any question about the program. He will also eventually be a passenger on Starship on a trip around the Moon as part of the DearMoon program sometime in the nearish future.

A second great option will be our friends over at NASASpaceflight (NSF as they now want to be called as they are not affiliated with NASA the agency). They too have been covering Starship’s development since the beginning and have had nearly 24/7 coverage of the site for the last few years. Their conversation may be a bit technical for some, but if you need constant chatter when SpaceX’s stream has none, this will be a good bet.

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Why is Starship IFT-3 important?

SpaceX’s Integrated Flight Test 3 is the company’s third launch of the entire Starship stack – both the booster and Starship second stage. This rocket will have many uses in its lifetime, the first being the first fully reusable commercial launcher that aims to drastically reduce the cost to get payloads to orbit.

The second will be as NASA’s lunar lander for the Artemis 3 and 4 flights to the Moon. SpaceX was selected in 2021 to be the first of two Artemis lunar landers. While many fear slower than anticipated development will mean delays for lunar exploration, NASA is pretty much stuck with it at this point.

The final use Starship will have is achieving the entire reason SpaceX exist – building a colony on Mars. While there are still far more problems that will have to solved to make that a reality, Starship will make humans one giant step close to landing on the Red Planet in the not so far off future.

So you should wake up nice and early and watch this mission one: because each one is a historic moment in our existence and two: because if something doesn’t go right you’ll get to see a massive rocket blow up. It’s kind of a win-win if you ask me. Well maybe not the early alarm but we can suffer together.