SpaceX Starship Hits Some Targets, Misses Others on Latest Test Flight

SpaceX Starship Hits Some Targets, Misses Others on Latest Test Flight | PCMag

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(Credit: Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

SpaceX’s Starship rocket returned to space on Friday after more than seven months off (and more than three years after the star-crossed debut of its first version) as a largely redesigned launch vehicle that performed a moderately successful test flight.Starship V3 lifted off at 5:30 p.m. Central time from SpaceX’s Starbase facility near Boca Chica, Texas, on 18 million pounds of thrust from 33 Raptor 3 methane-fueled engines in its first stage—two more engines than in V1 and V2 Starship boosters.One of those 33 engines cut out at about a minute and 40 seconds into the flight. However, the booster completed its part of the mission as the second stage kicked off Starship’s “hotstage” procedure, in which the upper stage’s six Raptors ignite just before the booster detaches, venting through a ring of struts between the two stages. You May Also Like

Then the booster’s engines failed to relight to control its descent, thwarting plans for a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. “It looks like we just had an early boostback shutdown,” SpaceX commentator Dan Huot said on the company’s livestream.For the sake of caution with a new design, SpaceX had ruled out trying to fly this booster back to the launch tower for a catch by mechanized arms, an extraordinary feat SpaceX first pulled off on Starship’s fifth launch. But even a powered descent didn’t happen, leaving the booster hitting the water hard.

Bye, Texas! (Credit: Rob Pegoraro/SpaceX)

The second stage, meanwhile, had one of its own engines shut down, with the remaining five burning for a little longer to send that ship on a suborbital journey mostly around the world.  That engine malfunction led SpaceX to skip plans to relight one Raptor in space, a prerequisite for a Starship orbital flight, since SpaceX needs to know that it can deorbit an upper stage. The mission’s other big in-space objective met no such glitches: Starship’s upper stage opened a narrow payload-bay door to eject 20 Starlink satellite simulators, plus two larger test spacecraft equipped with cameras that yielded video of the stage’s exterior.The vehicle’s trajectory sent it back into Earth’s atmosphere for a fiery return to gravity that the stage survived structurally intact before performing a series of maneuvers above the Indian Ocean that ended with a relight of two of its Raptors to settle itself into the water, engines down.The vehicle, looking distinctly charred, stood above the waves for a moment before toppling over and exploding, sending a bright-orange mushroom cloud into the sky. (SpaceX has now successfully landed more than 600 first stages of its phenomenally reliable Falcon 9 rocket, but any returning stage with leftover propellant is at risk of blowing up if it falls over.) A Significant Time for SpaceXFriday’s launch, following an attempt on Thursday that scrubbed after five last-minute holds because of a problem with a stuck pin on the launch tower, came at a particularly significant time for SpaceX. The company’s filing for its upcoming initial public offering, published Wednesday, features extensive reminders about how much SpaceX is counting on Starship and this fully reusable launch system’s low-Earth-orbit payload capacity of 110-plus tons to loft its Starlink ambitions:“We expect Starship to commence payload delivery to orbit in the second half of 2026.”“We expect that a single Starship launch will be capable of deploying up to 60 V3 satellites to LEO, representing a potential twenty-fold increase in Starlink downlink capacity deployed relative to a Falcon 9 launch.”“Any failure or delay in the development of Starship at scale or in achieving the required launch cadence, reusability and capabilities thereafter would delay or limit our ability to execute our growth strategy.”(In 2023, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk predicted Starlink deployments from Starship launches would happen in 2024.) 

The round object looks like a refueling port, part of SpaceX's plans to refuel Starship upper stages in orbit. (Credit: Rob Pegoraro)

NASA has almost as much riding on Starship performing as planned. The space agency awarded SpaceX a $2.89 billion contract in 2021—later revised to $4 billion, with $2.8 billion paid to date—to develop a version of Starship’s upper stage as a human lunar lander for its Artemis missions to the Moon. Five years ago, the NASA-designed Space Launch System rocket looked like the more likely holdup for those plans, but SLS aced its uncrewed Artemis I debut in November 2022 and then sent Artemis II’s four astronauts on a trip around the Moon in April. SpaceX then picked up some competition for this lunar-landing business in 2023 when NASA awarded Blue Origin a $3.4 billion contract to develop its own lander for later Artemis landings.  Recommended by Our Editors Starlink Mobile Will Target Cities, But SpaceX's IPO Hype Clouds the Picture SpaceX IPO Filing Offers First Glimpse at Starlink Subscriber Numbers, Financials SpaceX Flags Carriers' Cellular Satellite Joint Venture for Potential Collusion

Last October, acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy (his day job remains Secretary of Transportation) said he would reopen the human landing system contract and invite Blue Origin to submit a new proposal as an alternative to SpaceX's complicated mission architecture, which would require multiple in-orbit refuelings of a Starship lander.After a bout of juvenile rageposting by Musk, SpaceX said it would prepare a simplified version of its earlier design to compete with Blue’s own move to develop a smaller, simpler lander that could get American astronauts back on the Moon before Chinese astronauts can land there for their first time. NASA now expects to stage an Artemis III mission in low Earth orbit in 2027, in which SLS would send a crewed Orion capsule to meet up with a SpaceX or Blue Origin lander, ideally both. 

Having this flight end in a literal mushroom cloud was not ideal, metaphorically speaking. (Credit: Rob Pegoraro)

Blue Origin has its own issues; the third launch of the partly reusable New Glenn heavy-lift rocket it plans to use for its lander ended with a second-stage malfunction that sent AST SpaceMobile’s direct-to-phone satellite burning up on reentry. On Friday, the Jeff Bezos-owned firm said it had secured Federal Aviation Administration clearance for its fixes to that problem and was resuming plans for a fourth New Glenn launch. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, a private astronaut who has been to space twice on SpaceX Dragon capsules, showed up in Texas for the launch and voiced his own confidence in SpaceX in a brief appearance on the company’s livestream.“We’re looking forward to seeing this thing fly,” Isaacman said, wearing the blue flight suit he put on to fly his F-5 fighter jet down to Starbase. “We’re looking forward to meeting up next year in Earth orbit.” Isaacman then congratulated SpaceX in a post on X after the test flight: “One step closer to the Moon…one step closer to Mars.”But while Friday’s test met multiple marks for SpaceX, not enough things went right for the company to have sped up the time when it can put a Human Landing System upper stage into orbit.

About Our Expert Rob Pegoraro Contributor