Why is Starship important? Musk's reason for Starship and Super Heavy hinges on his belief that humanity needs to become a multi-planetary, space-faring species sooner rather than later. Musk sees Starship as the vehicle that will help SpaceX fulfill its vision of putting human boots on Mars. He ultimately wants hundreds of people traveling to the red planet in each Starship. NASA last year awarded SpaceX $2.9 billion specifically for Starship, which is envisioned as the lunar lander for the agency's Artemis program. If that architecture works out, it will take the next set of American astronauts from lunar orbit down to the surface of the moon during the Artemis III mission. The astronauts will use NASA's Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule to reach lunar orbit before docking with Starship, which will be waiting for them. "As part of (the original) contract, SpaceX will also conduct an uncrewed demonstration mission to the moon prior to Artemis III," NASA said late last year when it awarded a second contract to SpaceX for Starship development worth $1.15 billion. So far, the rocket has only made short sub-orbital test flights. An orbital flight is a major step toward preparing for that moon mission which is expected sometime before 2030. And Starship's orbital test flight means business for Florida, too: if all goes well with the orbital flight test and the program overall, SpaceX plans on launching Starship from pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center in the coming years. Missions with Starlink satellites, science payloads, and flights with crews destined for the moon and Mars are all in the planning phase. Has Starship launched before? Previous test flights, which often ended explosively, only featured the Starship vehicle itself, but this time the combined 400-foot vehicle is launching from Texas. SpaceX began building the first stainless steel prototype of Starship, known as "Starhopper," in Texas, where it successfully launched on a minute-long, low-altitude test flight known as a "hop" in August 2019. A series of suborbital test flights were designed to stress systems and components to inform the production of larger prototypes. In December 2020, the much larger Starship Serial Number 8 prototype was the first to successfully launch from Starbase. After liftoff, it sailed to a high-altitude, suborbital apogee and appeared to hover momentarily. Then, it turned around for a "belly flop" descent back to Earth. Though it exploded just short of its landing pad, all of SpaceX's core test objectives for that flight were achieved.