Five things to watch for when Starship takes off Saturday morning

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  SpaceX fans turned out at Starbase, the company's sprawling test facility in South Texas, on the eve of the second full-scale test flight of the Starship rocket. [credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica ]

Early Saturday morning, SpaceX will load more than 10 million pounds of super-cold methane and liquid oxygen into the propellant tanks inside the company's second flight-ready Super Heavy booster and Starship rocket.

Then, if all goes according to plan, 33 Raptor engines will light at 7 am CST (13:00 UTC) to propel this gigantic rocket into the sky over Boca Chica Beach, a remote stretch of South Texas shoreline a couple of miles north of the US-Mexico border. SpaceX will live stream the event on X.

Space fans got what they hope will be their last look at this particular rocket Friday night, hours before law enforcement closed off public access to the launch site. One of the neat things about SpaceX's privately-owned South Texas launch site, named Starbase, is the public can approach white a few hundred feet of the rocket. The surrounding mud flats, dunes, and beach are all public land.