by SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas – SpaceX’s Starship megarocket, the world’s largest and most powerful rocket, reached orbital speed for the first time Thursday in a historic third test flight from South Texas.
Hundreds of Spring Break spectators, rocket launch chasers and SpaceX fans gathered along the southern shore of South Padre Island and surrounding areas to witness the third test flight of the largest rocket ever built. About 5 miles (8 kilometers) south of the crowds, SpaceX’s massive Starship vehicle lifted off this morning (March 14) at 9:25 a.m. EDT (1325 GMT) from the company’s manufacturing and test launch facilities near Boca Chica Beach .
“Starship reached orbital velocity,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk announced on X (formerly Twitter) after liftoff. “Congratulations to the SpaceX team!” The launch took place on the 22nd anniversary of SpaceX’s founding in 2002, the company said.
Neither the Starship vehicle nor its Super Heavy booster made it all the way to their intended splashdown, but SpaceX officials said the test flight accomplished several of its key goals during the flight.
A cheer erupted from the South Padre crowd as the morning sky lit up the ignition of Starship’s 33 Raptor first-stage engines, which quickly shrouded nearly the entire vehicle in a plume of dust and smoke. Seconds later, the rocket rose 400-feet high (122 meters) from the ground, rapidly increasing to climb the sky.
“This flight started a lot, but we’re further than ever,” said SpaceX spokesman Dan Huot, just after taking off in a live stream. “We have a starship, not only in space, but on its coastal phase into space.”
Related: Relive SpaceX Starship’s 3rd flight test in amazing photos
Die Cast Starship Rocket Model Now $69.99 on Amazon.
If you can’t see SpaceX’s Starship in person, you can score your own model. Standing at 13.77 inches (35 cm), this is a 1:375 ratio of SpaceX’s Starship as a desktop model. The materials here are alloy steel and it weighs only 225g.
Note: Stock is low so you’ll need to act fast to get this. See Deal
Today’s launch, designated Integrated Flight Test-3 (IFT-3), was the third test mission for the fully stacked Starship. The first and second Starship launches ended explosively last year, with the vehicles exploding before each flight’s mission objectives were completed. However, data collected during those first flights helped SpaceX engineers prepare Starship for success down the road.
Among the improvements made between IFT-1 and IFT-2 last year was the implementation of a “hot staging” technique, in which the upper engines start firing before the Starship’s first stage booster, called Super Heavy, fully separates. The hot transfer of the IFT-2 stage was a success, as was also the case today.
High in the sky, Starship’s two stages separated about 2 minutes 45 seconds after liftoff, sending the 165-foot-tall (50 m) advanced spacecraft into space and Super Heavy began preparations for a burn reinforced to divert its trajectory. That afterburner reversed Super Heavy’s velocity, and was scheduled to be followed minutes later by a landing burn over the Gulf of Mexico. However, it appears that the Super Heavy’s engines did not come up as planned, resulting in a loss of boost.
“It didn’t fire all the engines we expected and we lost the booster,” Huot said. “We’ll have to go through the details to figure out exactly what happened, of course.”
Starship is designed to be completely reusable, and SpaceX plans to land and relaunch its Super Heavy boosters, as it does with its Falcon 9 rockets. In the future, two “chopstick” arms will get on a launch tower Starship the Super Heavy booster on its way back to land, but Super Heavy was always expected to flash IFT-3 down in the Gulf.
Related: Starship and Super Heavy: SpaceX’s deep space transport to the moon and Mars
Starship’s upper stage continued to fly after separation, but did not attempt to enter a full orbit. Instead, the spacecraft entered a sub-orbital coast phase as it soared above Earth, when SpaceX hoped to demonstrate two of the spacecraft’s flight systems toward vehicle quality — Starship Raptor engine recovery and transfer cryogenic fuel between tanks. After these performances, the spacecraft was expected to splash down in the Indian Ocean about 65 minutes after launch, but SpaceX lost contact with the Ship during re-entry.
“We are making the call now that we have lost Ship 28,” Huot said, referring to the Starship vehicle number, after a long period without telemetry contact with the vehicle. “We haven’t heard from the ship up to this point so the crew has made the call that a Ship is lost. So, no flash down today.”
Rapid progress is needed for Starship, which is on the critical path for NASA’s Artemis 3 mission. Artemis 3 aims to land the first humans on the moon since the end of the Apollo era in the early 1970s. Artemis 3 is currently scheduled for 2026, giving Starship less than two years to meet NASA’s vehicle qualifications for landing astronauts on the lunar surface.
Related: Facts about NASA’s Artemis program.
RELATED STORIES:
— Starship and Super Heavy: SpaceX’s transportation system on Mars
— SpaceX: Facts about Elon Musk’s private space flight company
— SpaceX delays second Starship test launch to Nov. 18 to replace rocket section
SpaceX also has other plans dependent on Starship. The company is relying on a payload capacity unlike Starship to launch the next generation of its Starlink internet satellites. Other Starship flights have been purchased by private entities, including Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa’s Dear Moon mission to fly himself and eight others around our closest celestial neighbor.
Starship’s success today probably reflects an increase in launches from SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility. The equipment needed to build the second launch tower at the site has begun to come together, and the infrastructure supporting Starship launches from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida is also well under way.
The end of faster launches would improve the quality of NASA’s Starship to carry astronauts, but achieving NASA’s ambitious Artemis 3 timeline could still be a stretch. SpaceX is no stranger to quick launches, however. Now in regular operation for more than a decade, the company’s Falcon 9 rocket has broken its own annual launch record year after year, and is set to do so again in 2024.
Starships are designed with even faster reusability in mind. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said the company eventually aims to launch, land and relaunch multiple Starship vehicles daily.
