SpaceX is charging ahead with its latest spaceship launch

The third attempt turned out to be closer to the charm for Elon Musk and SpaceX, as his company’s giant Starship rocket launched Thursday and traveled about halfway around the Earth before being lost upon re-entering the atmosphere.

The test flight reached several important milestones in the vehicle’s development, which could change the future of space transportation and help NASA return astronauts to the moon.

This particular flight was, by design, not intended to fly all the way around the Earth. At 8:25 a.m. Central Time, Starship – the largest and most powerful rocket ever to fly – lifted off from the coast of South Texas. The ascent was smooth, with the upper Starship stage reaching orbital speeds. About 45 minutes after launch, it began re-entering the atmosphere, heading for a belly flop in the Indian Ocean.

Live video, broadcast in near real time from SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, showed red-hot gases heating the underside of the vehicle. Then, 49 minutes after launch, communications with Starship were terminated, and SpaceX later said the vehicle did not survive reentry, likely disintegrating and falling into the ocean.

Still, NASA administrator Bill Nelson congratulated SpaceX on what he called a “successful test flight” of the system his agency is counting on for some of its Artemis moon missions.

SpaceX aims to enable both the vehicle’s lower rocket booster and the spacecraft’s upper stage to fly again and again — a stark contrast to the disposable, single-launch rockets that have been used for most of the space age.

That reusability gives SpaceX the potential to drive down the cost of putting up satellites and telescopes, as well as people and the things they need to live in space.

Completing most of the short jaunt was reassuring confirmation that the rocket’s design appears to be sound. Not only is Starship crucial to NASA’s moon plans, it’s also key to Musk’s dream of sending humans to Mars.

For Mr. Musk, the success also harkens back to his previous reputation as a technology visionary who led groundbreaking advancements at Tesla and SpaceX, a contrast to his troubled purchase of Twitter and the polarizing social media quagmire that has followed since he transformed and renamed the platform the X. Even as SpaceX launched its next-generation rocket, the social media company was dueling with Don Lemon, a former CNN anchor who share fragments from a combative interview with Mr Musk.

SpaceX still needs to pull off a series of formidable rocket launches before Starship is ready to go to the moon and beyond. Earlier this week, said Mr. Musk he hoped for at least six more Starship flights this year, during which some of those experiments could take place.

But if it achieves all these, the company could once again revolutionize the space sector and leave its competitors far behind.

Phil Larson, a White House space adviser during the Obama administration who also previously worked on communications efforts at SpaceX, said Starship’s size and reusability had “tremendous potential to change the game in transportation to orbit.” to change the earth. And it could make whole new types of missions possible.”

NASA is counting on Starship to serve as a lunar lander for Artemis III, a mission that will take astronauts to the moon’s surface for the first time in more than 50 years. That trip is currently scheduled for the end of 2026, but seems likely to be postponed to 2027 or later.

The third flight was a marked improvement over the first two launch attempts.

Last April, Starship managed to leave the launch pad, but a series of engine failures and fires in the booster led to the rocket’s destruction 24 miles above the Gulf of Mexico.

In November, the second Starship launch traveled much further. All 33 engines in the Super Heavy booster operated properly during ascent, and after successful separation, the Starship upper stage nearly reached orbital speeds. However, both stages exploded.

Still, Mr. Musk hailed both test flights as successes because they provided data that helped engineers improve the design.

Thursday’s launch — which coincided with the 22nd anniversary of SpaceX’s founding — occurred 85 minutes into a 110-minute launch window. The 33 engines in the booster ignited at the launch site outside Brownsville, Texas, lifting the rocket, which was the size of a 40-story building, into the morning sky.

Most of the flight went smoothly and a number of test objectives were accomplished during the flight, such as opening and closing the spacecraft’s cargo doors, which will be needed to deliver cargo in the future.

SpaceX did not attempt to recover the booster this time, but did allow it to cause engine burns necessary to return to the launch site. However, the booster’s final landing, performed over the Gulf of Mexico, was not completely successful – an area that SpaceX will look to fix for future flights.

SpaceX said the Super Heavy broke up at an altitude of about 1,500 feet.

SpaceX engineers will also have to figure out why Starship didn’t survive reentry and make improvements to the vehicle’s design.

Even with the partial success of Thursday’s flight, Starship is still far from ready to go to Mars or even the moon. Due to Musk’s ambitions for Mars, Starship is much larger and much more complicated than what NASA needs for its Artemis moon landings. For Artemis III, two astronauts will spend about a week in the moon’s South Pole region.

“It had the low price,” Daniel Dumbacher, the executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a former senior NASA official, said of Mr. Musk, “and NASA chose to take the risk that with that configuration was accompanied. hoping it would work. And we’ll see if that turns out to be true.”

To leave Earth’s orbit, the Starship must have its fuel tanks refilled with liquid methane and liquid oxygen. That requires a complex choreography of additional spacecraft launches to deliver the propellants into orbit.

“This is a complicated, complicated problem, and there’s a lot that needs to be solved, and a lot of it needs to work well,” Mr. Dumbacher said.

Thursday’s flight included an early test of that technology, moving liquid oxygen from one tank to another within Starship.

Mr. Dumbacher does not expect Starship to be ready in September 2026, the launch date NASA currently has for Artemis III, although he cannot predict how much delay there might be. “I’m not going to give you a chance on it because there’s way too much work and way too many problems to solve,” he said.