SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas — SpaceX's Starship megarocket, the world's largest and most powerful rocket, reached orbital speed for the first time Thursday on its historic third test flight from South Texas.
Hundreds of spring break spectators, rocket launch trackers and SpaceX fans gathered on the south shore of South Padre Island and surrounding areas to witness the third test flight of the largest rocket in history. About 5 miles (8 kilometers) south of the crowd, SpaceX's giant Starship vehicle was spotted at the company's manufacturing site near Boca Chica Beach this morning (March 14) at 9:25 a.m. EDT (13:25 GMT).・It was launched from a test launch facility.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk: “The spacecraft has reached orbital speed” Published in X (Formerly Twitter) After takeoff. “Congratulations, SpaceX team!!” Both the Starship vehicle and its super heavy booster did not survive to the planned splashdown, but SpaceX officials said the test flight was still in flight. He said he had achieved some of his key goals.
As the dim morning sky was illuminated by the ignition of Starship's 33 first stage Raptor engines, cheers erupted from the South Padre crowd, and soon nearly the entire vehicle was covered in a plume of dust and smoke. Seconds later, a 400-foot-tall (122-meter) rocket rose from the plume and rapidly picked up speed toward the sky.
“This flight has just begun, but it has gone farther than we've ever gone before,” SpaceX spokesman Dan Fott said on a livestream shortly after launch. “We have spacecraft. Not only in space, but also on the coastal stage heading into space.”
Related: Check out some great photos and videos from Starship's second launch
Today's launch, called Integrated Flight Test-3 (IFT-3), was the third test mission for the fully stacked spacecraft. Last year, the first and second Starship launches both ended explosively, with the vehicle exploding before each flight's mission objectives were completed. But the data collected during these first flights helped SpaceX engineers prepare her Starship for future success.
Improvements made between IFT-1 and IFT-2 last year include the implementation of “hot staging” technology, where the upper stage engines begin firing before Starship's first stage booster, known as the Super Heavy, has fully separated. was included. The hot staging of IFT-2 was another success today.
High in the sky, Starship's two stages separated about 2 minutes and 45 seconds after liftoff, sending the 165-foot-tall (50-meter) upper spacecraft into space. Meanwhile, Super Heavy began preparing for a boostback burn to change its trajectory. This post-staging burn was intended to reverse Super Heavy's velocity and be followed by a landing burn several minutes later over the Gulf of Mexico. However, it appears that the Super Heavy's engine failed to reignite as planned, leading to the loss of its booster.
“We couldn't fire all the engines that we expected and lost the booster,” Huot said. “Obviously we have to look at the data to understand exactly what happened.”
Starship is designed to be completely reusable, and SpaceX plans to land and relaunch it with a superheavy booster, similar to the Falcon 9 rocket. In the future, her two “chopstick” arms on Starship's launch tower will catch the Super Heavy booster as it returns to land, but IFT-3's Super Heavy will always have water droplets in the Gulf. It was expected to fall.
Related: Spacecraft and superheavy ships: SpaceX's deep space transport to the Moon and Mars
Starship's upper stage continued to fly after separation, but did not attempt to enter full orbit. Instead, the spacecraft will enter a sub-orbital coast phase as it soars over Earth, during which SpaceX will test two of the spacecraft's flight systems toward vehicle certification: the re-ignition of Starship's Raptor engine and the tank. We wanted to demonstrate the transfer of cryogenic fuel between After these demonstrations, the spacecraft was expected to splash down in the Indian Ocean about 65 minutes after liftoff, but SpaceX lost contact with the spacecraft during reentry.
“We're calling now because we lost Ship 28,” Huot said, referring to the Starship's vehicle number after a long period of time with no telemetry of contact with the vehicle. “Up to this point, there has been no contact from the ship, so the team has notified us that the ship is missing. Therefore, there will be no water landings today.”
Starship, which is on the critical path of NASA's Artemis 3 mission, requires rapid progress. Artemis 3 aims to be the first human landing on the moon since the end of the Apollo era in the early 1970s. Artemis 3 is currently planned for 2026, leaving Starship less than two years away from qualifying for his NASA vehicle to land astronauts on the moon.
Related: Facts about NASA's Artemis program
SpaceX is doing a lot with its reusable Starship launch system, and its primary role is to land NASA's Artemis 3 astronauts on the moon by 2026, with a Landing will require more than 10 Starship launches. The company already sells private trips around the moon on Starship, and sees Starship and Super Heavy as keystones of its Mars and deep space exploration programs, as well as heavy-lift launch options for the Starlink mega-constellation and other payloads. There is.
Time (hour:minute:second) | flight event | Header Cell – Column 2 |
---|---|---|
T+00:02 | unload | Row 0 – Cell 2 |
T+00:52 | Starship/Super Heavy Reach Max Q | Row 1 – Cell 2 |
T+2:42 | Super heavy main engine cutoff | Row 2 – Cell 2 |
T+2:44 | Hot stage separation/Starship Raptor engine ignition | Row 3 – Cell 2 |
T+2:55 | Super heavy boost backburn start | Row 4 – Cell 2 |
T+3:50 | Super heavy boost backburn engine stopped | Row 5 – Cell 2 |
T+6:36 | Super heavy is transonic | Row 6 – Cell 2 |
T+6:46 | Super heavy landing burn | Row 7 – Cell 2 |
T+7:04 | Super heavy landing combustion shutdown | Row 8 – Cell 2 |
T+8:35 | Spacecraft engine stopped | Row 9 – Cell 2 |
SpaceX also has other plans for Starship. The company relies on Starship's unparalleled payload capacity to launch its next generation of Starlink internet satellites. Other Starship flights have been purchased by private groups, including the Dear Moon mission in which Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa himself and eight others will fly around the sky next to the sky. It will be done.
Starship's success today likely signals an increase in launches from SpaceX's Boca Chica facility. The equipment needed to build a second launch tower at this location is beginning to arrive for assembly, and the infrastructure to support Starship's launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida is also well underway.
A faster launch cycle would speed up NASA's certification of Starship to transport astronauts, but it may still be a long way off reaching the timeline of NASA's ambitious Artemis 3 program. However, SpaceX is used to a fast pace of launches. The company's Falcon 9 rocket has been in regular service for more than a decade now, breaking its own annual launch record each year and is on track to do so again in 2024.
Starship is designed with even faster reuse in mind. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said the company eventually aims to launch, land and relaunch multiple Starships every day.