(Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
After a rocky ride to space on its 14th launch, SpaceX’s Starship rocket went where no other Starship has gone in almost 3.5 years of test launches: Earth orbit.
For a few anxious minutes, it looked like this flight would follow the same suborbital trajectory as earlier missions. With one of six upper-stage engines shutting down early, flight controllers waved off the planned orbital-insertion burn. "We're only going to commit to orbit if everything is looking really healthy," launch communicator Dan Huot said on SpaceX’s livestream. "Because of that, we are not going to do the additional burn that would send us into orbit."
But then, somebody (we have to wonder if it was SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who years ago pinned his hopes for next-generation spaceflight on this massive launch vehicle) apparently suggested taking another look at the data, because Huot came back on to say: “Actually, stand by.” After noting “a lot of conversation in the room behind me,” Huot related a reset of that earlier scrub: “The go/no-go poll for orbit has finished, and we are go for orbit.”
After a 19-second burn of one of those six methane-fueled Raptor engines on Starship’s upper stage (which SpaceX also calls “Starship”), the vehicle reached an orbit of about 173 miles up.
Minutes later, Starship began deploying its high-priority payload: 26 Starlink V3 satellites that will add enormous capacity to the low-Earth-orbit broadband constellation. SpaceX touts 1Tbps of downlink capacity and 160Gbps of uplink on each satellite, served by 2,048 downlink and uplink beams, about 10x the capacity of V2 satellites, small enough for its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket to fly.
By 9:53 a.m., all 26 V3 satellites had been ushered out of the upper stage and on their way to their own orbits through a slit of a payload bay door.
This Starship launch began at 8:48 a.m. ET from SpaceX’s Starbase launch facility near Boca Chica, Texas. All 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster ignited, although one cut out about two minutes after liftoff. After staging, the second stage had one of its Raptors cut out roughly seven minutes after launch, requiring the other five to burn longer to put the vehicle on its initial suborbital trajectory.
The booster performed a series of maneuvers to simulate a return to its launch site, but two of the required 13 engines failed to ignite for the first burn. A livestream run by NASASpaceflight.com showed the booster slicing into the Gulf of Mexico a little fast, sinking into the water, and then exploding.
SpaceX designed Starship’s two stages to fly back to a launch tower for a catch by large metal assemblies and accomplished that with boosters on the rocket’s fifth, seventh, and eighth flight tests.
Since an April 2023 debut that ended with Starship exploding 24 miles up, Starship has had an unusually prolonged and sometimes problematic test campaign in which individual engines have shut down early, and multiple upper stages have exploded in the upper atmosphere. Flight 13, however, hit all its marks and ended with an improbable stroke of luck when its upper stage splashed down in the Indian Ocean under control, and it did not explode from leftover propellant.
That stage did not sink; weeks later, a recovery team brought the vehicle within sight of land, allowing it to be slowly transported back to Starbase.
Taking 14 launches to reach orbit is unusually long by SpaceX’s own standards and almost anyone else’s. A vastly less-experienced SpaceX needed four tries to reach orbit with its Falcon 1 rocket in 2008 (which it did 18 years ago Monday), and its rival Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket reached orbit on its first try last January.
But Starship is a far more ambitious design than any flying today; SpaceX aims to have both stages not just reusable but rapidly so. The “rapidly” part remains in doubt, since the heat-shielding tiles visible on Flight 13’s upper stage showed the kind of damage that would require extensive refurbishment.
SpaceX’s Starlink hopes aren’t the only thing riding on this rocket reaching a high operational cadence from launch facilities in Texas, Florida, and eventually Louisiana. Elon Musk’s scheme for a vast system of orbital data centers–with a $26 trillion market forecast laid out in SpaceX’s IPO filing–also relies on Starship.
NASA also has a stake in Starship, having awarded SpaceX a $2.89 billion contract in 2021–since revised to $4 billion, with $2.9 billion paid so far–to build a version of Starship’s upper stage as a human lunar lander for its Artemis project.
SpaceX’s concept of operations, which the company said last November it would simplify, demands sequential Starship launches to fill the fuel tanks of a Starship Human Landing System vehicle. SpaceX has yet to demonstrate that capability.
The space agency has since given SpaceX competition, awarding a $3.4 billion contract to Blue Origin in 2023 to develop its own Blue Moon lander for later Artemis landings. NASA now hopes to see both SpaceX and Blue Origin have prototype Moon landing vehicles ready for a test in Earth orbit in 2027 as part of its Artemis III mission.
Blue Origin is now scrambling to return New Glenn to flight after an explosion of that rocket during an on-pad test in May incinerated much of its launch infrastructure, but SpaceX has an enormous amount of work to do for its single highest-profile customer. Having Starship finally reach orbit is one small step towards that.
SpaceX had originally planned for Monday’s mission to last six orbits but elected to bring home Starship early. The upper stage performed a de-orbit burn at two hours and 12 minutes into the flight, survived a scorching re-entry, streamed live via Starlink, and performed a landing burn to lower itself into the Pacific Ocean, north of Hawaii.
This ship, however, did not have the same landing luck as its predecessor, and exploded moments after toppling into the waters. As Huot had said earlier in the mission: “We say ‘excitement guaranteed’; we don’t lie.”
Editors' Note: We updated this post with details about the conclusion of the flight.
About Our Expert
Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.
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