SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space company, launched its Starship rocket from the South Texas coast on Saturday, a mammoth vehicle that could change the future of space transportation and help NASA return astronauts to the moon.
Saturday’s flight of the Starship, a powerful vehicle designed to carry NASA astronauts to the moon, was not a complete success. SpaceX did not achieve the actual goal of the test launch – a partial around-the-world flight that ended with a water disaster in the Pacific Ocean.
However, the test flight, the vehicle’s second, showed that the company had corrected key issues that had arisen during the earlier test operation in April. All 33 engines in the vehicle’s lower booster stage ignited and the rocket made it through the stage separation – as the booster dropped and the six upper stage engines lit up to propel the vehicle into space.
“Just beautiful,” John Insprucker, a SpaceX engineer and live launch commentator, said on the SpaceX webcast.
SpaceX’s Starship rocket launched from Boca Chica, Texas, on Saturday for the vehicle’s second test flight. Photo credit: Timothy A. Clary/Agence France-Presse – Getty Images
In contrast, the launch site was severely damaged during the first Starship launch; Several of the launch vehicle’s engines failed, fires destroyed the rocket’s guidance system, and the flight abort system took too long to explode.
According to SpaceX’s “fail fast, learn faster” approach to rocket design, successfully avoiding a repeat of previous mistakes is considered major progress.
However, the second flight revealed new challenges that Mr. Musk’s engineers must overcome.
Shortly after stage separation, the launch vehicle exploded—a “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” as rocket engineers call it. The Starship upper stage spacecraft continued toward orbit for several minutes, reaching an altitude of more than 90 miles, but then SpaceX lost contact with it after the flight abort system exploded.
In a statement, the Federal Aviation Administration said no injuries or property damage were reported. A mishap investigation is conducted, which is standard practice any time something goes wrong with a commercial rocket.
Engineers must now decipher what went wrong with both the booster and the upper stage spacecraft, make corrections and then try again.
Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever to fly. SpaceX’s goal is to make both parts of the vehicle fully and quickly reusable. That gives it the potential to carry larger and heavier payloads into space and significantly reduce the cost of transporting satellites, space telescopes, people and the things they need to live into space.
The result 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 flight on Friday, Disney and Apple paused advertising spending on another of its companies, the social network X, formerly known as Twitter, after Mr. Musk endorsed an anti-Semitic post on Wednesday.
Many outside observers are optimistic that SpaceX will make Starship fully operational.
The rocket booster’s engines performed better than in an April flight, achieving separation of the rocket’s lower stage from the upper stage.Credit: Eric Gay/Associated Press
“They fixed the problems identified on their first flight and have gone further with this type of vehicle 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 about learning, iterating on the design, and flying again soon.”
Daniel L. Dumbacher, 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 can 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 cirrus clouds.
The countdown went smoothly and ended at a scheduled stopping point with 40 seconds left on the countdown clock. Then the hold was lifted, the final seconds passed, and shortly after 7 a.m. (central time), the 400-foot-tall rocket slowly rose into the sky. A new floodplain system appears to have protected the launch pad and avoided the cloud of dust and debris that rose in April.
A few seconds later, the percussive roar shook spectators on South Padre Island, about five miles north of the launch site.
Two minutes and 48 seconds after liftoff, there was a flash as Starship successfully completed what was expected to be the most difficult part of the flight – “hot staging,” in which the six upper stage engines fired before the booster dropped. Loud cheers echoed from the SpaceX webcast, streamed from the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California.
The Super Heavy booster exploded shortly after separation while the Starship vehicle continued flying into space. It too exploded several minutes into its flight. Photo credit: Adam Davis/EPA, via Shutterstock
Half a minute later there was a major flash as the launch vehicle, which was about to splash and sink in the Gulf of Mexico, exploded. The high school continued unscathed. But a few minutes later, the webcast fell into an awkward silence as contact with the Starship vehicle was lost.
Many of the thousands of people who rose early to watch the launch on South Padre Island said they enjoyed the spectacle. At 4:30 a.m., a long line of cars waited in the darkness to enter Isla Blanca Park at the southern end of South Padre. Others left their hotels on foot to avoid traffic. Boats filled with observers floated a little further south, outside the exclusion zone to the east.
The launch was witnessed not only by spectators on the shore, 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 caused her house to shake.
“It was a lot earlier than we all expected, so it woke everyone up,” said Ms. Guevara, who is an organizer with the Sierra Club and has been protesting operations at the company’s headquarters.
Senior NASA officials congratulated SpaceX.
“Each test represents one step closer to putting the first woman on the moon with the #Artemis III Starship human landing system.” Jim Free, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration systems development, said: wrote on X. “I look forward to seeing what we can learn from this test and what brings us closer to the next milestone.”
How quickly SpaceX solves the Starship problems could determine how quickly NASA astronauts return to the moon.
The space agency has hired SpaceX to convert Starship into a lunar lander to carry two astronauts to the south polar regions of the moon. Even before the last Starship test flight, it was assumed that the first landing, currently scheduled for the end of 2025, would likely be postponed to 2026. SpaceX also has a contract to provide a Starship lander for the second manned landing, scheduled for 2028.
Photographers and spectators gathered in the early hours of the morning to witness the launch. Photo credit: Eric Gay/Associated Press
To land on the moon, SpaceX would need not just one spacecraft, but nearly 20 spacecraft launches, since a spacecraft heading to the moon would have to refill its fuel tanks before leaving Earth’s orbit.
SpaceX is planning two more Starship variants.
One of these will essentially be an orbital gas station in space – a fuel depot in the language of the space business. The other will be a tanker version to transport methane and liquid oxygen to the gas station. Filling the gas station requires a series of tanker flights. A spacecraft heading to the Moon or Mars will take off, dock at the fuel depot and refill its tanks. But no one has yet tried pumping tons of fuel in a zero-gravity environment.
As a depot orbits the Earth, sunlight will repeatedly pass through it, and the outside of the depot will repeatedly warm and cool. Keeping fuel at the depot at constant, ultra-cold temperatures will be a challenge.
At a NASA advisory committee meeting on Friday, Lakiesha Hawkins, NASA’s deputy associate administrator, said the number of Starship 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 has a backup. This year, it chose a second lunar lander design from Blue Origin — the Kent, Washington-based rocket company founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. This design is smaller and is intended to be used in the third moon landing, which will not take place until 2029 at the earliest.
Ryan Mac and Katrina Miller contributed reporting.