by The launch of a 400-foot-tall (122-meter) rocket won’t seem like news for much longer.
SpaceX’s massive Starship vehicle took off for the third time today (March 14) on an ambitious test flight that has energized space fans around the world.
A starship did not meet all of its targets today; their first stage booster, known as Super Heavy, and their advanced spacecraft were lost as they came back to Earth, for example. But the megarocket flew faster, further and farther than before, praising the company and NASA, whose Artemis program will use Starship to land astronauts on the moon.
“Congratulations to @SpaceX on a successful test flight! A starship is soaring high in the heavens. Together, we’re making great strides through Artemis to return humanity to the moon – then look at Mars,” the head of NASA, Bill Nelson said via X today.
Related: SpaceX launches massive Starship rocket into space on epic 3rd test flight (video)
Read more: Relive SpaceX Starship’s 3rd flight test in amazing photos
Starship’s first manned lunar landing for NASA is scheduled for September 2026, on the agency’s Artemis 3 mission. Getting Starship up and running in time to meet that deadline will require a lot of work—and SpaceX has rolled up its sleeves.
The company has already built four other Starships at its Starbase facility in South Texas, which hosted today’s launch.
“These vehicles are slated for future flight tests just like today’s,” said Siva Bharadvaj, space operations engineer at SpaceX, during a webcast of today’s launch.
“And, in fact, just this week, we made our next ship planning to fly and expect to test the booster as soon as the launch vehicle is free from today’s flight test,” a he said.
SpaceX will aim to lift these and future vehicles as quickly as possible, in keeping with the company’s “build, fly and repeat” philosophy. In fact, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said this week that the company hopes to launch at least six Starship missions in 2024.
Musk is known for his aggressive timelines, but that might be possible. Seven months had passed between the first Starship test flight, in April 2023, and the second one, which took place last November. The gap between flight two and today’s launch was only four months, so things are moving in the right direction.
And the turnaround for flight four should be even shorter, given today’s mission milestones. For example, Super Heavy made a successful “booster stream” after separating from the upper stage, landing itself in place for a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico (although it did not surrender its landing stream).
And the upper stage reached orbital velocity, opened its payload door in space as it does on operational flights, deployed a satellite, and survived back into the Earth’s atmosphere for a while. The ship managed to bring home incredible video of their fierce ordeal before going dark about 50 minutes after the breach. (Starship flights one and two lasted only four minutes and eight minutes, respectively.)
Related: See amazing photos and videos of Starship’s 2nd launch
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And the end of Starship flight is likely to increase significantly after it is operational. For example, before each lunar landing mission, a Starship will need to replenish its tanks at a propellant depot in Earth orbit.
It will take numerous Starship “tanker” missions to fill this depot. How much is a matter of debate, in part because of the uncertainty about how much of the supercooled propellant will “boil off.” Musk has pegged the number of tanker flights per Starship lunar landing at four to eight, but NASA officials said it could be “in the high teens.” Whatever the final number is, that’s a lot of Starship launches.
SpaceX also plans to use Starship to help humanity settle on Mars, as Musk has repeatedly emphasized (including after today’s flight). Establishing a sustainable city on the Red Planet would require a huge number of launches, even though Starship is the most powerful rocket ever built. (In the final version, Starship will be able to tow up to 275 tons into Earth orbit, Bharadvaj said during today’s webcast.)
To give you an idea: A few years back, Musk laid out a plan to send fleets of 1,000 starships to the Red Planet every 26 months, the recurring window when Earth and Mars align properly for interplanetary missions.
That might be too ambitious or, if possible, a nod to a distant future. But it’s safe to assume we’ll have plenty more chances to watch the new Starship fly in the coming months.
