Starship Is Not Even Flying Yet, And It's Already Docked with the ISS. In Imagination Land

But until we learn if the Starship actually goes up or not, let’s go again through what the spaceship is supposed to do during this historic day.

The thing, hailed as the most powerful rocket ever built, has been envisioned as a means of transport for both humans and cargo to Earth orbit but, more importantly, to the Moon as well. The Starship, as we see it today, is also the precursor of a piece of hardware that will eventually help us set foot on Mars for the first time.

The technology has been in testing stages over at SpaceX for quite some time now, but to date, we’ve only got suborbital flights of the rocket’s booster, all of them meant to make it clear the rocket can land after its mission is completed, just like most other SpaceX boosters do.

Today’s mission is the first that will see the booster actually shooting the Starship into orbit. The spacecraft will not spend more than several tens of minutes up there, taking off from Texas, going around our planet once, and splashing down off the coast of Hawaii. The booster, of course, should return to its designated launch pad in Boca Chica.

So, nothing more spectacular than orbiting our planet once for this mission. Even if successful, we’re still a long way from actually seeing the Starship dock with the International Space Station (ISS), or heading out to the Moon and Mars.

But that isn’t stopping some people from imagining the Starship as it performs things it’s not yet ready to perform. So now, on the eve of the rocket’s launch, we give you the first-ever Starship-ISS docking video.

It’s not something that happened in real life, of course, but an animation put together by specialist Hazegrayart. It’s not even a full 4-minute or so video the likes of which we’re used to from this crew, but one of those YouTube Shorts we keep getting flooded with.

Yet it’s more than enough to paint a pretty good picture of how the not-so-distant future of space exploration might look like with the Starship up there, and you can enjoy it fully below this text.

As for the actual Starship launch, we’re told the departure window opens today at 8:28 a.m. CT and will stay so for 62 minutes. SpaceX will begin a live webcast of the event 45 minutes before the scheduled liftoff.