SpaceX’s showpiece Starship rocket reaches orbit for first time

The largest rocket developed by SpaceX has successfully reached orbit, marking an important milestone for the private aerospace company.

“Starship is orbital,” mission control announced to cheers on a livestream on Monday that showed the spacecraft’s launch from a base in Texas in the United States.

The uncrewed spacecraft almost didn’t achieve the long-desired goal after one of its engines shut down too soon. But with everything else working well and the bad engine no longer needed, flight controllers decided after several tense minutes to proceed as planned.

Founder Elon Musk’s showpiece rocket – the biggest and most powerful ever built – carried 26 of the latest and most advanced Starlink satellites to join the 11,000 older models already providing internet service. It was Starship’s 14th full-scale launch from Texas’s southern tip in three years. The earlier test flights ventured no farther than the Indian Ocean halfway around the world, often crashing in flames and briefly skimming space.

This time, SpaceX was intent on circling the globe from an altitude of 275km (170 miles) – not just once but six times over almost 10 hours, ending with a Pacific splashdown near Chile. The first-stage booster wasn’t meant to return to the Starbase launch site, either, instead dropping into the Gulf of Mexico within minutes of the morning liftoff.

SpaceX wants to ensure that everything works before flying Starship back to Starbase. If the spacecraft breaks apart over land and rains debris onto people, “our popularity would diminish very rapidly”, Musk said at a business summit earlier this month. “That’s why we’re being extremely cautious here.”

If all goes well with this orbital debut, the next Starship will return to the launch pad with giant mechanical arms grabbing the hovering spacecraft. If the catch works – Musk gives it even or slightly better odds – then SpaceX will re-fly the spacecraft by year’s end or early next.

The 124 metre (407-foot) rocket was designed from the start to be fully reusable – a key to lowering launch costs. SpaceX managed to salvage the last Starship from the Indian Ocean in July. Engineers modified the newly launched Starship’s heat shield based on hands-on inspections from the recovered spacecraft, which is being tugged back to Starbase.

SpaceX is pressing hard to certify Starship for orbital flight, a vital step towards moon and Mars travel.

NASA’s Artemis III mission is coming up as soon as next summer, and will feature a triple-launch docking exercise in orbit around Earth between an Orion capsule full of astronauts and competing lunar landers. Jeff Bezos’s Blue Moon will blast off first, then Orion – which will close in for a linkup – then Musk’s Starship for a docking with Orion once Blue Moon launches.

The next mission – Artemis IV, slated for no sooner than 2028 – would have astronauts landing on the moon in either Blue Moon or Starship, whichever is ready first. Subsequent moonshots will alternate between the two billionaires’ landers.

Musk originally developed Starship for Mars, intending to launch scores of them with the red planet’s first settlers. For now, he plans to focus on the moon and use Starship to haul satellites into orbit by the truckload, phasing out the company’s frailer Falcon 9 rocket within several years. A second Starship launch site is nearing completion at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center and a third is planned for the US state of Louisiana.