by The fourth test flight of the largest and most powerful rocket ever built is in the books, and it’s been a dramatic journey for SpaceX.
SpaceX launched its Starship megarocket for the fourth time ever today (June 6) at 8:50 a.m. EDT (1250 GMT), launching the vehicle 400 feet (122 meters) aloft from its Starbase site near Boca Chica Beach in South Texas. . on top of thundering fire pillars.
There were two main goals today: bringing down Starship’s first stage booster, called Super Heavy, for a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, and achieving a controlled re-entry of the 165 ft (50 m) upper stage, called Starship or simply Ship. Both the Super Heavy booster and its Ship appeared to land on water, sending onlookers at SpaceX mission control at Starbase into a frenzy of cheers.
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
“This whole building was going absolutely crazy,” SpaceX spokesman Dan Huot said during a live commentary from the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California. “When we saw the booster hit the water, I mean, wow.”
Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, was delighted.
“Successful soft landing on the Starship Super Heavy rocket booster!” he wrote on X (formerly Twitter) after a splash.
Meanwhile the Long Starship vehicle appeared to have nailed its landing despite the fact that one of its flaps had apparently suffered burn damage when it was falling. Live camera footage showed that the flap’s heat shield had burned off, covering the camera with debris, and eventually cracking the lens.
Still, the camera came back despite several signal drops, proving every time Starship was live. Landing, the Ship appeared to flip as planned and make its landing burn, SpaceX said.
“Despite losing many tiles and a damaged flap, Starship made it all the way to a soft landing in the ocean!” Elon Musk wrote on X later. “Congratulations to the SpaceX team on an epic achievement!!
The crowd, as you would expect, went wild.
“It was so loud here,” said Kate Tice, SpaceX’s senior manager of quality systems engineering, during live commentary. “I haven’t heard the crowd get louder, I guess, since Flight One.”
Tice, Huot and SpaceX’s Jessie Anderson celebrated the Starship landing by toasting a marshmallow with a Starship-shaped lighter.
Related: Relive SpaceX Starship’s 3rd flight test in amazing photos
Starship sees the fully reusable starship as a revolutionary advance in spaceflight, one that could eventually make human settlement of the moon and Mars economically feasible.
In fact, the vehicle was designed with Mars in mind: Its next-generation Raptor engines (33 for Super Heavy and six for Long) burn liquid oxygen and liquid methane, both of which can be found on the Planet Red.
Starship’s first stop, however, is likely to be the moon. NASA selected the craft as the first crewed lander for its Artemis lunar exploration program, which aims to establish a research base in the ice-rich southern polar region by the late 2020s. The current architecture calls for Starship to land NASA astronauts on the moon for the first time in September 2026, on the Artemis 3 mission.
Starship will have to undergo many more test flights before it’s ready for that landmark mission, but the stainless steel spacecraft is off to a good start: It has made significant progress on each of its four ascents to until now.
Starship’s two stages failed to separate on its first flight, which took place in April 2023. That mission ended with the vehicle’s controlled detonation tumbling just four minutes after liftoff. (And that rise exploded a crater under Starbase’s orbital launch vehicle, forcing SpaceX to install a water-sucking metal plate as a heat booster.)
Flight 2, in November 2023, achieved phase separation but still ended early; Ship and Super Heavy were reduced to swirling bits in Earth’s atmosphere within 8 minutes of launch.
Starship made a big leap with Flight 3, which launched on March 14 of this year. Stage separation occurred in time, and Super Heavy got within 1,650 feet (500 meters) of the waves of the Gulf of Mexico before separating. Meanwhile, the ship reached orbital velocity and flew for almost 50 minutes, finally succumbing to intense frictional heating as it re-entered our atmosphere after an uncontrolled roll due to the loss of its reaction control system , SpaceX said.
Flight 4 improved even more, as the Super Heavy made it safely to the water and the ship appeared to have control of the roll in flight.
During the launch, the Super Heavy booster appeared to fire 32 of the Raptor’s 33 engines during the transition, with one engine clearly out in videometry and telemetry. When the Super Heavy fired its 13-engine landing gear, only 12 engines fired, but the booster still appeared to make its “soft landing,” SpaceX said.
RELATED STORIES:
— SpaceX launches massive Starship rocket into space on epic 3rd test flight (video)
— Starship and Super Heavy: SpaceX’s transportation system on Mars
— FAA to oversee investigation into SpaceX Starship’s 3rd test flight
If you missed today’s promotion, don’t worry: There will likely be many more Starship launches in the near future. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said the company aims to launch six test flights of the megarocket in 2024, with four more operating aloft in the next six months.
The timeline isn’t entirely up to SpaceX, of course; regulators such as the Federal Aviation Administration have a say. But, true to its fast-moving ways, SpaceX is already preparing for the upcoming Starship launches. It tested the Flight 5 vehicle early last month, for example.
