Starship’s eleventh test flight lifted off from the company’s Starbase launch site, 20 miles (32 km) east of Brownsville, at around 7.23 p.m. ET.
SpaceX on Monday carried out a largely successful test flight of its giant Starship rocket from Texas as the Elon Musk-headed company gears up to take astronauts to the moon in a few years.
Starship’s eleventh test flight lifted off from the company’s Starbase launch site, 20 miles (32 km) east of Brownsville, at around 7.23 p.m. ET. This was the final flight of the second-generation Starship and the first-generation Super Heavy booster before the company moves on to its upgraded version of the rocket.
On Monday, in less than 10 minutes after the launch, the booster separated from the starship, ignited its engines, and then hovered over the water before a controlled splashdown. The mission was mostly similar to the last successful test flight in August, with the Starship deploying mock Starlink satellites and relighting a Raptor engine, demonstrating a critical capability for future deorbit burns.
The Starship then re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere, moved toward the Indian Ocean, before successfully executing a landing flip, landing burn, and soft splashdown. It erupted into a fireball after that amid the company’s efforts to test its heat shields.
“Great work,” Musk said on X in a post. The launch also earned praise from active NASA administrator Sean Duffy, who said the mission was “another major step toward landing Americans on the Moon’s south pole.”
After costly failures earlier this year, Monday’s successful launch is likely to silence many critics who have raised concerns over the company’s ability to carry NASA astronauts to the moon in 2027 for now. The U.S. aims to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972, as it seeks to compete with China, which has its own plans to send humans there by 2030.
However, before it takes off with astronauts, Starship needs to carry out several upgrades, including changes to its docking adapters to perform orbital refueling, which involves two Starships docking in orbit to transfer tons of rocket propellant. The company was expected to test the upgrade this year.
“It is highly unlikely that we will land on the moon before China,” Jim Bridenstine, a former NASA administrator, said during a Senate hearing in September, as per a Bloomberg News report, citing the complexity of Starship as one of the main reasons.
Retail sentiment on Stocktwits about SpaceX’s rival Rocket Lab was in the ‘bullish’ territory at the time of writing.
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