Starship, a futuristic spacecraft designed by SpaceX to send astronauts to the moon and beyond, launched today, Thursday, toward the skies of Texas (United States) in its third test carried out by Elon Musk's company. It has completed almost the entire flight — surpassing the previous two tests, which ended in explosions — but SpaceX has already confirmed that the spacecraft was destroyed during its re-entry into the atmosphere.
The two-story vehicle, which is taller than the Statue of Liberty, took off from the SpaceX space base near Boca Chica, on the Texas coast, on an unmanned space flight in low orbit. Nearly three minutes into the flight, at an altitude of 72 kilometers, he performed a major separation maneuver.
This test flight, which lasted much longer than previous flights, was the third for the Starship spacecraft mounted on top of a Super Heavy rocket. Both Starship and Super Heavy were designed and built by SpaceX, the rocket and satellite company founded by millionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk in 2002.
The spacecraft remained in space for 15 minutes after liftoff and was scheduled to reenter the atmosphere about 50 minutes into the mission, with the ship destroyed in this final phase.
During transmission Connected From SpaceX, company commentators who followed the launch said that mission control lost communications with the ship as it reentered the atmosphere. The vehicle was about to make its planned dive into the Indian Ocean about an hour after launch. A few minutes later, SpaceX confirmed that the ship had been lost: it had presumably burned up, broken up during its re-entry, or crashed into the sea.
A live broadcast of the liftoff from SpaceX had previously shown a rocket rising from the launch pad into the sky, as the Raptor's powerful engine array ignited in a ball of fire and clouds of water vapor and gases grew around it.
Joe Skipper/Reuters
Although it failed in the final phase of the mission, the fact that it nearly completed the expected one-hour flight path is a new milestone in the development of a spacecraft crucial to Elon Musk's satellite launch plans and NASA's lunar program. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson congratulated SpaceX on what he considered a “successful flight test,” in a statement on the social media network X.
During the flight, the spacecraft reached a maximum altitude of 234 kilometers, according to SpaceX. The company's engineers hoped to improve on Starship's two previous performances, which ended in explosions just minutes after liftoff. The company had already announced before the trip that there was a high probability that this new trip would also end with the ship being destroyed before its end.
All indications still point to the spacecraft being a long way from being fully operational. Elon Musk said the rocket would have to fly hundreds of times without a crew before transporting humans. Many other ambitious milestones remain to be achieved before the spacecraft can transport NASA astronauts to the lunar surface.
Elon Musk is counting on Starship to achieve his goal of building the next generation of larger, multi-purpose spacecraft capable of sending people and cargo to the moon at the end of this decade, and eventually flying to Mars.
Closer to Earth, Elon Musk also sees Starship as the ship that will eventually replace the Falcon 9 rocket as the backbone of the company's commercial launch operations, which already launches, worldwide, most satellites and other payloads to low Earth orbit.
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