SpaceX's Elon Musk to give big Starship update today: Watch it live
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SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk will give an update about the company's Starship vehicle today (Oct. 5), and you can watch it live.
Musk will speak for about an hour at the 74th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) today, beginning at 9:45 a.m. EDT (1345 GMT). You can watch his lecture, titled "Creating a More Exciting Future," live here at Space.com, courtesy of the International Astronautical Federation (IAF), the space advocacy body that organizes the IAC every year.
"As the most powerful launch system ever developed, SpaceX's Starship and Super Heavy launch vehicle is a fully and rapidly reusable transportation system designed to carry satellites, payloads, crew and cargo to a variety of orbits and Earth, lunar or Martian landing sites," the IAF wrote in a description of the event, which will be moderated by Clay Mowry, the organization's president.
"SpaceX's Chief Engineer Elon Musk will provide an update on the design and development of Starship as SpaceX strives to fundamentally change the future of space transportation and help make life multiplanetary," the organization added.
Related: Relive SpaceX's explosive 1st Starship test in incredible launch photos
The Starship deep-space transportation system consists of two elements — a huge first-stage booster called Super Heavy and a 165-foot-tall (50 meters) upper stage known as Starship.
Both of these components are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, the key breakthrough that Musk believes will make Mars settlement and other extraordinary exploration feats economically feasible.
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A fully stacked Starship has one liftoff under its belt to date. On April 20, the vehicle launched on a test flight from SpaceX's South Texas facility that aimed to send the upper stage partway around Earth. (Splashdown was targeted for the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.)
However, Starship suffered a number of problems shortly after liftoff, including the failure of its two stages to separate, and the vehicle was intentionally destroyed high above the Gulf of Mexico.
SpaceX is currently gearing up to launch a second test flight, though the company is still waiting on a launch license from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.
Musk has made something of a habit of giving Starship updates at the IAC. He also did so at the 2016 meeting in Guadalajara, Mexico, and the 2017 gathering in Adelaide, Australia. This year, the IAC is convening in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan.
