SpaceX Launches Starship Toward Orbit Despite Engine Loss During Ascent
SpaceX launched its massive Super Heavy-Starship rocket on its first orbital test flight on Monday morning, overcoming an early engine failure to push the vehicle into space from the company’s Starbase facility on the Texas Gulf Coast.
The 400-foot-tall rocket lifted off at 8:49 a.m. EDT as all 33 methane-burning Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster ignited, generating roughly 16 million pounds of thrust. The rocket steered southeasterly out over the water, producing about double the thrust of NASA’s Space Launch System moon rocket.
During the climb out of the atmosphere, the Starship upper stage lost one of its engines. Following a review of the vehicle’s flight data, controllers cleared the spacecraft to continue on its path toward orbit.
The launch follows 13 previous suborbital test flights, roughly half of which ended in explosions as SpaceX worked through early hardware and flight issues. Monday’s flight represents a pivotal milestone for both the company and NASA, which intends to use a modified version of Starship to land astronauts on the lunar surface under the Artemis program in 2028.
Future lunar landings will rely on multiple Super Heavy-Starship tanker launches to fuel the lander in orbit before it heads to the moon to dock with NASA’s Orion crew capsule. Demonstrating that Starship can reliably enter orbit is a necessary precursor to testing large-scale, autonomous in-space refueling operations.
SpaceX Starship
Two minutes and 20 seconds into Monday’s flight, the vehicle initiated a hot-staging separation, firing the upper stage’s six Raptor engines while the booster fell away. The booster was programmed to reverse course and perform a controlled vertical splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
SpaceX has previously caught the first-stage booster with launch pad arms four times, but chose an ocean landing for this flight to verify recent software and engine updates following a hard landing on the prior attempt.
The flight plan calls for the Starship upper stage to enter a 180-mile-high orbit through two separate burns. Once in orbit, the craft is scheduled to open a dispenser in its nose and deploy 26 third-generation Starlink internet satellites, each carrying ten times the capacity of earlier models to support global broadband coverage and orbital data processing.
After completing six orbits over roughly ten hours, Starship is scheduled to fire its engines for a de-orbit burn. The craft will then reenter Earth’s atmosphere belly-first, use its aerodynamic flaps to guide its descent through extreme reentry heat, and reignite three engines to touch down vertically in the ocean off the coast of Chile.