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SpaceX launched the company's Super Heavy-Starship on its first flight to orbit Monday, a major step toward perfecting the world's most powerful rocket for commercial flights and NASA moon missions.
The Starship upper stage lost an engine during ascent, but after some discussion, flight controllers cleared it to continue on to orbit.
With 13 suborbital test flights behind them, this flight marks a crucial step for both SpaceX and NASA. Getting the Starship into orbit and back would boost confidence SpaceX has a shot at perfecting the system in time to support NASA's planned Artemis moon landing, using a variant of the Starship, in 2028.
A future moon mission will require multiple Super Heavy-Starship tanker flights to fuel the lander for its flight to the moon before docking with a NASA Orion crew capsule, in lunar orbit, picking up two astronauts and carrying them down to the surface and back.
Getting the Starship safely into orbit will set the stage for follow-on test flights to demonstrate autonomous orbital refueling, a feat never before attempted at the scale required for Artemis moon landing missions. SpaceX Starship mission plan
The Super Heavy booster's 33 methane-burning Raptor engines ignited with a rush of flame at 8:49 a.m. EDT, quickly propelling the 400-foot-tall rocket away from SpaceX's Starbase launch site on the Texas Gulf Coast.
The Super Heavy first stage booster, generating some 16 million pounds of thrust — twice the power of NASA's Space Launch System moon rocket — rapidly accelerated as it consumed propellant and lost weight, climbing out of the thick lower atmosphere along a southeasterly trajectory.
Two minutes and 20 seconds after liftoff, the first stage engines were expected to begin shutting down while the six Raptors powering the Starship upper stage began firing up in a "hot staging" maneuver seconds before the the booster separated and fell away.
While the Starship continued toward space, the Super Heavy booster was programmed to flip around, restart its engines to reverse course and then to fly itself back to the Texas Gulf Coast, restarting 13 engines for a controlled, vertical splashdown a few miles off shore.
During the first hour of the six-orbit 10-hour mission, the Starship upper stage is expected to deploy 26 third-generation Starlink internet satellites that will join the company's ever growing constellation in only the second use of the new rocket to launch operational satellites.
SpaceX launched the company's Super Heavy-Starship on its first flight to orbit Monday, a major step toward perfecting the world's most powerful rocket for commercial flights and NASA moon missions.