SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas – SpaceX’s Starship megarocket, the world’s largest and most powerful rocket, reached orbital speed for the first time Thursday during a historic third test flight from South Texas.
Hundreds of Spring Break spectators, rocket launchers and SpaceX fans gathered along the southern shores of South Padre Island and surrounding areas to witness the third test flight of the largest rocket ever built. About 5 miles south of the crowds, SpaceX’s massive Starship vehicle lifted off from the company’s production and test launch facilities near Boca Chica Beach this morning (March 14) at 9:25 a.m. EDT (1325 GMT).
“The spaceship reached an orbital velocity,” said SpaceX founder Elon Musk announced on X (formerly Twitter) after launch. “Congratulations SpaceX team!!” The launch took place on the 22nd anniversary of SpaceX’s founding in 2002, the company said.
Neither the Starship vehicle nor the Super Heavy booster survived all the way to the intended landing, but SpaceX officials said the in-flight test flight achieved several of its key objectives.
Cheers erupted from the South Padre crowd as the dim morning sky was illuminated by the ignition of Starship’s 33 Raptor engines, quickly engulfing nearly the entire vehicle in a plume of dust and smoke. Seconds later, the 400-foot (122-meter) rocket lifted off from the plume, rapidly increasing its ascent toward the sky.
“This flight has pretty much just started, but we’re further along than we’ve ever been,” SpaceX spokesman Dan Huot said in a livestream shortly after launch. “We have a spaceship not only in space, but also on the coast in space.”
Related: Relive SpaceX Starship’s third flight test in breathtaking photos
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Today’s launch, called Integrated Flight Test-3 (IFT-3), was the third test mission for the fully stacked spacecraft. The first and second Starship launches both ended explosively last year, with the vehicles detonating before each flight’s mission objectives were achieved. However, the data collected during those first flights helped SpaceX engineers prepare Starship for success on the road.
Improvements made last year between IFT-1 and IFT-2 include the implementation of a “hot staging” technique, in which the upper stage engines begin firing before Starship’s first stage booster, known as Super Heavy , is completely separated. IFT-2’s rapid staging maneuver was a success, just like today.
High in the sky, Starship’s two stages separated approximately 2 minutes and 45 seconds after liftoff, sending the 50-meter upper stage spacecraft into space while Super Heavy began preparing for a boostback burn to to change its trajectory. That post-staging burn reversed Super Heavy’s speed and was scheduled to be followed several minutes later by a landing burn over the Gulf of Mexico. However, it appears that the Super Heavy’s engines did not reignite as planned, leading to the loss of the booster.
“It didn’t turn on all the engines we expected and we lost the booster,” Huot said. “We will obviously have to go through the data to find out exactly what happened.”
Starship is designed to be completely reusable, and SpaceX plans to land and relaunch its Super Heavy boosters just like it does with its Falcon 9 rockets. In the future, two “chopstick” arms on 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 splash down in the Gulf.
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The Starship’s upper stage continued flying after the separation, but did not attempt to enter full Earth orbit. Instead, the spacecraft entered a suborbital coastal phase while hovering above Earth, during which SpaceX hoped to demonstrate two of the spacecraft’s flight systems toward vehicle qualification: the restart of Starship’s Raptor engines and the transfer of cryogenic fuel between tanks. Following these demonstrations, the spacecraft was expected to crash into the Indian Ocean approximately 65 minutes after launch, but SpaceX lost contact with the ship during reentry.
“We are calling now that we have lost ship 28,” Huot said, referring to the spaceship’s vehicle number, after an extended period without telemetry from contact with the vehicle. “So far we haven’t heard anything from the ship and that’s why the team called that the ship was lost. So no splashdown 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 for 2026, giving Starship less than two years to meet NASA vehicle qualifications for landing astronauts on the lunar surface.
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SpaceX also has other plans related to Starship. The company is relying on Starship’s unparalleled payload capacity to launch the next generation of Starlink internet satellites. Other Starship flights have been purchased by private entities, including Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa’s Dear Moon mission to fly himself and eight others around our nearest celestial neighbor.
Starship’s success today likely signals an increase in launches from SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility. Equipment needed to build a second launch tower at the site has arrived for assembly, and infrastructure to support Starship launches from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida is also well underway.
A faster launch frequency would expedite NASA’s qualification of Starship to carry astronauts, but meeting NASA’s ambitious Artemis 3 timeline could still be a tall order. However, SpaceX is no stranger to fast launch cadence. The company’s Falcon 9 rocket, which has been in regular service for more than a decade now, has broken its own annual launch record year after year, and will do so again in 2024.
Starship was designed with even faster reusability in mind. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said the company eventually wants to launch, land and relaunch multiple Starship vehicles every day.