SpaceX makes progress on second launch of Giant Moon and Mars Rocket
SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space company, launched its Starship rocket from the coast of South Texas on Saturday, a massive vehicle that could change the future of space transportation and help NASA return astronauts to the moon.
Saturday’s flight of Starship, a powerful vehicle designed to take NASA astronauts to the moon, was not a complete success. SpaceX fell short of the test launch’s ultimate goal: a partial circumnavigation of the world that ended in a landing in the Pacific Ocean.
But the test flight, the vehicle’s second, showed that the company had resolved major issues that arose during the previous test operation in April. All 33 engines in the vehicle’s lower booster stage fired, and the rocket reached phase separation – when the booster cuts out and the six upper stage engines light up to carry the vehicle to space.
“Just beautiful,” John Insprucker, a SpaceX engineer and live launch commentator, said on the SpaceX webcast.
In contrast, the first Starship launch severely damaged the launch site; several booster engines failed, fires disabled the rocket’s controls, and the flight termination system took too long to detonate.
According to SpaceX’s “fail fast, learn faster” approach to rocket design, successfully avoiding a repeat of past failures counts as major progress.
However, the second flight revealed new challenges that Musk’s engineers must overcome.
Shortly after the stages separated, the booster exploded – a “rapid, unplanned disassembly,” in the jargon of rocket engineers. The upper-stage Starship spacecraft continued toward Earth orbit for several more minutes, reaching an altitude of more than 90 miles (150 kilometers), but SpaceX lost contact with it after its flight termination system detonated.
In a statement, the Federal Aviation Administration said no injuries or property damage were reported. It will conduct an accident investigation, which is standard when something goes wrong with a commercial rocket.
Engineers will now have to decipher what went wrong with both the booster and the upper stage spacecraft, apply fixes and then try again.
Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket to ever fly. SpaceX aims to make both parts of the vehicle fully and quickly reusable. That gives it the potential to launch larger and heavier payloads into space and significantly reduce the cost of putting up satellites, space telescopes, people and the things they need to live in space.
The outcome of the test trip was the latest split-screen moment in the career of Mr Musk, a serial entrepreneur who previously transformed electronic payments with PayPal and electric cars with Tesla. As SpaceX prepared for the flight on Friday, Disney and Apple halted their ad spending at another of its companies, the social network X, formerly known as Twitter, after Musk approved an anti-Semitic post on Wednesday.
Many outside observers are optimistic that SpaceX will make Starship fully operational.
“They solved problems on their first flight and took this type of vehicle further than ever before,” said Phil Larson, who served as a White House space adviser during President Barack Obama’s administration and later worked on communications efforts at SpaceX . “The magic of engineering is that it’s all about learning, iterating on the design and moving on quickly.”
Daniel L. Dumbacher, the executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, agreed. “This is a big launch system,” he said. “It’s going to take some work to get it where it needs to go. I have no doubt that the SpaceX team will be able to figure out how to make the launch vehicle work.”
A few hours before sunrise on Saturday, liquid oxygen and liquid methane began flowing into the spacecraft. There was some fog near the ground, but the sky above was clear except for a few wisps of cirrus clouds.
The countdown went smoothly, stopping at a scheduled break with 40 seconds left on the countdown clock. Then the hold was lifted, the final seconds ticked away and shortly after 7 a.m. Central Time, the 400-foot rocket slowly rose into the sky. A new flood system appears to have protected the launch pad and avoided the cloud of dust and debris that rose in April.
Seconds later, the percussive roar hit spectators on South Padre Island, about five miles north of the launch site.
Two minutes and 48 seconds after takeoff, there was a flash as Starship successfully performed what was expected to be the trickiest part of the flight: “hot staging,” igniting the six upper stage engines before the booster cut out. Loud cheers rang out from the SpaceX webcast, which was streamed from the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California.
Half a minute later there was a bigger flash as the booster – which was set to splash and sink in the Gulf of Mexico – exploded. The top stage continued unscathed. But a few minutes later, the webcast fell into an awkward silence when contact with the spaceship was lost.
Many of the thousands of people who woke up early to attend the launch on South Padre Island said they enjoyed the spectacle. At 4:30 a.m., a long line of cars waited in the dark to enter Isla Blanca Park on the south side of the South Padre. Others walked out of their hotels to avoid traffic. Boats full of spectators floated just south, outside the exclusion zone to the east.
The launch was experienced not only by those watching along the coast, but also by those further away.
Emma Guevara, a resident of Brownsville, the South Texas city west of the SpaceX launch site, said the event shook her home.
“It was a lot earlier than we all expected, so it woke everyone up,” said Ms. Guevara, who is an organizer for the Sierra Club and has protested operations at the company’s base.
Top NASA officials congratulated SpaceX.
“Each test represents one step closer to placing the first woman on the moon with the #Artemis III Starship human landing system.” Jim Free, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration systems development, wrote on X. “I look forward to seeing what we can learn from this test that will bring us closer to the next milestone.”
How quickly SpaceX fixes the Starship problems could determine how quickly NASA astronauts return to the moon.
The space agency has hired SpaceX to adapt Starship as a lunar lander to take two astronauts to the moon’s south polar regions. Even before the latest Starship test flight, it was already believed that the first landing, currently scheduled for late 2025, will likely be pushed back to 2026. SpaceX is also under contract to provide a Starship lander for the second crewed landing, planned for 2028.
The moon landing would require SpaceX not just one spacecraft, but nearly two dozen spacecraft launches, because a spaceship bound for the moon must refill its fuel tanks before leaving Earth’s orbit.
Before that, SpaceX is planning two other Starship variants.
One of them will essentially be an orbital gas station in space – a propellant depot in the language of space travel. The other will be a tanker version to transport methane and liquid oxygen to the gas station. It takes a number of refueling flights to fill the gas station. A spaceship bound for the moon or Mars will launch and dock at the propellant depot and refill its tanks. But no one has yet tried pumping tons of propellants in a zero-gravity environment.
As a depot orbits the Earth, it goes in and out of sunlight, and the outside of the depot will repeatedly warm and cool. Keeping the propellants at stable, ultra-cold temperatures in the depot will be a challenge.
At a NASA Advisory Council committee meeting on Friday, Lakiesha Hawkins, an assistant deputy administrator at NASA, said the number of spacecraft launches would be in the “high teens.”
The Starships would launch “on a six-day rotation” from both the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the current Starship launch site in Texas, Ms. Hawkins said.
NASA does have a backup. This year it selected a second lunar lander design from Blue Origin – the rocket company based in Kent, Washington, founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. That design is smaller and is planned for use in the third moon landing, which will take place no earlier than 2029.
Ryan Mac And Katrina Miller reporting contributed.