SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas — SpaceX's massive Starship rocket, 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 shores of South Padre Island and surrounding areas to watch the third test flight of the largest rocket ever. 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 testing facilities near Boca Chica Beach. .
“The spacecraft has reached orbital speed,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk It was announced in X (formerly Twitter) after take-off. “Congratulations to the SpaceX team!!” The launch occurred on SpaceX's 22nd anniversary in 2002, the company said.
Neither Starship nor its super-heavy booster survived to its intended end, but SpaceX officials said the test flight achieved several of its key goals during the flight.
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Cheers rang out from the South Padre crowd as the gloomy morning sky was lit up by the ignition of the Starship's 33 first-stage Raptor engines, which quickly covered almost the entire vehicle in a plume of dust and smoke. Seconds later, the 400-foot (122 m) rocket rose from the shaft, rapidly increasing its climb skyward.
“This flight has almost just begun, but we're further along than we've ever been before,” SpaceX spokesman Dan Hout said just after liftoff on a live stream. “We have a spacecraft, not just in space, but on its coast in space.”
Related: See stunning photos and videos of Starship's second launch
Today's launch, called Integrated Flight Test 3 (IFT-3), was the third test mission for the fully stacked spacecraft. The first and second spacecraft launches ended explosively last year, with the vehicles exploding before completing each flight's mission objectives. However, data collected during those first flights helped SpaceX engineers set Starship up for future success.
Improvements made between IFT-1 and IFT-2 last year included the implementation of “hot staging” technology, where the upper stage engines begin firing before the Starship’s first stage booster, known as Super Heavy, separates completely. IFT-2's hot staging maneuver was a success, as it was today as well.
High in the sky, the spacecraft's two stages separated about 2 minutes and 45 seconds after liftoff, sending the spacecraft in the 165-foot (50-meter) upper stage into space while Super Heavy began preparations for a booster burn to redirect its path. An after-staging burn reversed the speed of the Super Heavy, and was supposed 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 operate as planned, resulting in the loss of the booster.
“It didn't fire all the engines we expected and we lost booster,” Hutt said. “We'll have to review the data to find out exactly what happened, of course.”
The spacecraft is designed to be fully reusable, and SpaceX plans to land and relaunch its Super Heavy boosters, as it does with its Falcon 9 rockets. In the future, two “chopsticks” on the Starship's launch tower will catch the Super Heavy booster as it returns for landing, But IFT-3's Super Heavy was always expected to land in the Gulf.
Related: Starship and Super Heavy: SpaceX's deep space transportation to the Moon and Mars
The spacecraft's upper stage continued to fly after separation, but did not attempt to enter a full orbit. Instead, the spacecraft entered the suborbital coast phase during its flyby above Earth, where SpaceX hopes to demonstrate two of the spacecraft's flight systems toward vehicle qualification — restarting the Starship's Raptor engines and transferring cryogenic fuel between tanks. After these demonstrations, the spacecraft was expected to land in the Indian Ocean about 65 minutes after launch, but SpaceX lost contact with the ship during reentry.
“We're making the call now that we've lost Ship 28,” Huett said, referring to the Starship's number, after a long period without measuring contact with the spacecraft. “We haven't heard anything from the ship up to this point so the team has issued a call that the ship has been lost. Therefore, no landing 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 to launch in 2026, giving Starship less than two years to meet NASA's vehicle qualifications to land astronauts on the moon's surface.
Related: Facts about NASA's Artemis program
SpaceX has a lot riding on its reusable Starship launch system, most importantly its role in landing NASA Artemis 3 astronauts on the moon by 2026, which will require… More than a dozen The spacecraft is launched upon landing on the moon's surface. The company has already sold private flights around the Moon aboard Starship and sees Starship and Super Heavy as the backbone of its Mars and deep space exploration plan, as well as heavy launch options for the massive Starlink constellation and other payloads.
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| Time (hour:minute:second) | Aviation event | Header cell – column 2 |
|---|---|---|
| T+00:02 | Leaves | Row 0 – Cell 2 |
| T+00:52 | Space/super heavy vehicle reaches Max Q | Row 1 – Cell 2 |
| T+2:42 | Extremely heavy main engine cut-off | Row 2 – Cell 2 |
| T+2:44 | Hot staging/ignition separation of the Raptor spacecraft engine | Row 3 – Cell 2 |
| T+2:55 | Start burning super heavy booster | Row 4 – Cell 2 |
| T+3:50 | Turn off the engine to burn too heavy boost | Row 5 – Cell 2 |
| T+6:36 | Super Heavy is Transonic | Row 6 – Cell 2 |
| T+6:46 | Very heavy landing burn | Row 7 – Cell 2 |
| T+7:04 | Super heavy duty burn shut off | Row 8 – Cell 2 |
| T+8:35 | Spacecraft engine parts | Row 9 – Cell 2 |
SpaceX has other plans hinging on Starship as well. The company is relying on Starship's unparalleled payload capacity to launch its next generation Starlink Internet satellites. Other Starship flights have been purchased by private entities, including the Dear Moon mission by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa to fly himself and eight others around our nearest celestial neighbor.
Today's Starship success likely indicates an uptick in launches from SpaceX's Boca Chica facility. Equipment needed to build a second launch tower at the site has begun arriving for assembly, and the infrastructure supporting spacecraft launches from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida is well underway.
A faster launch pace would speed up spacecraft qualification by NASA to carry astronauts, but reaching the ambitious timeline for NASA's Artemis 3 could prove difficult. However, SpaceX is no stranger to fast launch rhythms. In regular operation now for more than a decade, the company's Falcon 9 rocket has broken its own annual launch record year after year, and is scheduled to do so again in 2024.
Starship is designed with faster reusability in mind. Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, said the company aims to eventually launch, land and relaunch several Starship vehicles per day.
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