‘Biggest most powerful rocket’: SpaceX Starship prepares for launch

The rocket Elon Musk wants to one day use for a Mars mission is poised for an initial flight attempt to space, a landmark test for the vehicle and Mr. Musk' s SpaceX.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has issued Elon Musk's company with a licence to put its most powerful rocket system through its paces, saying it met all safety and environmental requirements.

The Starship rocket is due to blast off for its debut orbital test from Brownsville, Texas, on Monday, 8am Central Time (2pm UK time) with the flight test window opening an hour before.

A live broadcast of the event should begin 45 minutes before lift-off.

Musk set low expectations for the launch.

"Success if not what should be expected," he told a private Twitter audience on Sunday night, saying the best-case scenario would provide crucial data about how the vehicle ascends to space and how it will fly back to Earth.

"Probably tomorrow will not be successful. It's just a very fundamentally difficult thing."

The rocket is set to become the most powerful ever to be launched into space. The company has said it will have more than 16mn pounds of thrust, roughly twice that of the previous record holder, the Saturn V rocket that carried Americans to the moon in the 196os and1970s.

Starship would be carried skyward by a Super Heavy prototype called Booster 7 from a launch pad in Brownsville.

The rocket system's second stage - the craft that would carry a crew of astronauts in the future - would then be deployed and complete a full orbit of the Earth, before re-entering the atmosphere and splashing into the Pacific.

Meanwhile, the first stage would be discarded in the Gulf of Mexico.