The third try proved to be closer to the charm for Elon Musk and SpaceX, as his company’s mammoth Starship rocket launched Thursday and traveled about halfway around Earth before disappearing as it re-entered the atmosphere.
The test flight achieved several key milestones in the development of the vehicle, which could change the future of space transportation and help NASA return astronauts to the Moon.
This particular flight was not intended, by design, to go around the Earth. At 8:25 am central time, Starship — the largest and most powerful rocket ever to fly — took off from the South Texas coast. Ascent was smooth, with the Starship upper stage reaching orbital speeds. About 45 minutes after launch, it began re-entering the atmosphere, heading for a belly-fall in the Indian Ocean.
Live video, transmitted in near real time via SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, showed hot gases heating the underside of the vehicle. Then, 49 minutes after launch, communications with the Starship were lost, and SpaceX later said the vehicle had not survived re-entry, possibly disintegrating and falling into the ocean.
Still, Bill Nelson, NASA’s administrator, congratulated SpaceX for what he called a “successful test flight” of the system his agency is counting on for some of its Artemis lunar missions.
SpaceX aims to make both the vehicle’s lower booster and the spacecraft’s upper stage capable of flying again and again — a stark contrast to the single-launch rockets that have been used for most of the space age.
This reusability enables SpaceX to reduce the cost of building satellites and telescopes, as well as the people and things needed to live in space.
Completing most of the short jaunt was a reassuring validation that the rocket’s design appears to be sound. Starship is not only critical to NASA’s lunar plans, but is key to Mr. Musk’s dream of sending humans to live on Mars.
For Mr. Musk, the success also comes on the back of his past reputation as a technology visionary that led to major advances at Tesla and SpaceX, in contrast to Twitter’s struggling market and the polarizing social media quagmire that has followed since. who revamped the platform and renamed it X. Even as SpaceX launched its next-generation rocket, the social media company was dueling with Don Lemon, a former CNN anchor who was share clips from a combative interview of Mr. Musk.
SpaceX still needs to pull off a series of formidable rocket firsts before Starship is ready to head to the moon and beyond. Earlier this week, said Mr. Musk he hoped for at least six more Starship flights this year, during which some of these experiments might take place.
But if it pulls it all off, the company could once again revolutionize the space transportation industry and leave competitors far behind.
Phil Larson, a White House adviser during the Obama administration who also previously worked on communications efforts at SpaceX, said Starship’s size and reusability had “huge potential to be a game-changer in orbital transportation. And it could enable whole new categories of mission.”
NASA is counting on Starship to serve as the lunar lander for Artemis III, a mission that will take astronauts to the surface of the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. That trip is currently scheduled for late 2026, but it seems likely to fall into 2027 or later.
The third flight was a marked improvement from the first two launch attempts.
Last April, Starship made it off the launch site, but a cascade of engine failures and booster fires led to the rocket’s destruction 24 miles over the Gulf of Mexico.
In November, the second Starship launch traveled much further. All 33 Super Heavy booster engines functioned properly during ascent, and after a successful separation, the Starship upper stage nearly reached orbital speeds. However, both stages ended in an explosion.
Still, Mr. Musk hailed both test flights as successes, as they provided data that helped engineers improve the design.
Thursday’s launch — which coincided with the 22nd anniversary of SpaceX’s founding — came 85 minutes into a 110-minute launch window. The booster’s 33 engines ignited at the launch site outside Brownsville, Texas, and lifted the rocket, which was as tall as a 40-story building, into the morning sky.
Most of the flight went smoothly, and many test objectives were accomplished during the flight, such as opening and closing the spacecraft’s payload doors, which will be needed for future cargo deliveries.
SpaceX didn’t try to recover the booster this time, but instead had it do the engine burns it would need to return to the launch site. However, the final landing burn for the booster, performed over the Gulf of Mexico, was not fully successful – an area that SpaceX will try to correct for future flights.
SpaceX said the Super Heavy disintegrated at an altitude of about 1,500 feet.
SpaceX engineers will also need to figure out why the Starship didn’t survive reentry and make corrections to the vehicle’s design.
Even with the partial success of Thursday’s flight, Starship is a long way from going to Mars or even the moon. Because of Mr. Musk’s Mars ambitions, the Starship is much larger and much more complex than what NASA needs for its Artemis moon landings. For Artemis III, two astronauts will spend about a week in the South Pole region of the Moon.
“He had the low price,” Daniel Dumbacher, executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a former senior NASA official, said of Mr. Musk, “and NASA chose to take the risk associated with that configuration. hoping that he will succeed. And we’ll see if it turns out to be true.”
To leave Earth orbit, the Starship must refill its propellant tanks with liquid methane and liquid oxygen. This will require a complex choreography of additional Starship launches to get the propellants into orbit.
“This is a complex, complex problem, and there’s a lot that needs to be sorted out and a lot that needs to get right,” Mr. Dumbacher said.
Thursday’s flight involved an early test of this technology, transferring liquid oxygen from one tank to another inside the Starship.
Mr Dumbacher does not expect Starship to be ready until September 2026, NASA’s current launch date for Artemis III, although he would not predict how much of a delay there might be. “I’m not going to give you a guess because there’s too much work, too many problems to solve,” he said.