On Third Try, SpaceX’s Starship Reaches Space Before an Explosive Re-Entry

SpaceX celebrated its 22nd birthday by lighting 33 candles on a beach in Texas—sending its Starship rocket most of the way around Earth for the first time in a flight test that ended with its upper stage burning up on re-entry.

The rocket lifted off at 8:25 a.m. Central time on 16.7 million pounds of thrust from 33 Raptor engines from the Boca Chica, Texas, facility SpaceX calls Starbase, a day after receiving Federal Aviation Administration clearance for the test. 

Unlike the two prior Starship test flights—one last April that saw Starship tumble out of control and explode 24 miles up, and another in November that ended with the automated flight-termination system self-destructing Starship’s upper stage—this one featured what looked like a smooth ascent for the 397-foot-tall vehicle, the most powerful in the world.

Its Super Heavy first stage’s methane-fueled engines stayed lit before blinking out as intended during a hot-staging sequence in which the second stage began lighting its own six Raptor engines while still attached, venting through an interstage latticework.

Cut loose, the booster staged a further series of burns to slow itself down for a planned soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico, along the lines of how SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters autonomously land for reuse. But they apparently didn’t slow the stage enough, and SpaceX later reported that the booster experienced a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” (read: explosion) just above the water.

Eight and a half minutes after launch, Starship’s second stage shut down as the spacecraft reached 93 miles up. Getting the vehicle to space intact was arguably the most important objective of this mission–one that SpaceX needed four tries to achieve with its Falcon 1 rocket back in 2008, six years and change after its March 14, 2002, founding. 

Starship then stepped through a series of tests—such as opening and closing the payload-bay door that SpaceX plans to use to deploy future Starlink satellites and transferring fuel from one tank to another as a preview of SpaceX’s plans to refuel Starships in orbit for missions to the Moon and beyond. All of it was streamed live with an easy-listening jazz soundtrack.

SpaceX, however, skipped a planned test of re-lighting Starship’s engines that could have raised its trajectory enough to qualify as orbit, leading to a re-entry attempt that provided a hell of a show to viewers but was too much for the ship to survive.

Video streamed via Starlink showed a bright plasma glowing around Starship’s heat-shield tiles—the spacecraft has 18,000 on its underside, a bit like those on the Space Shuttle, to absorb the heat of reentry—and flight-control fins that flexed back and forth.

Plasma building up below SpaceX’s Starship as it begins a re-entry that it wouldn’t survive. (Credit: Rob Pegoraro/SpaceX)

The livestream also showed Starship shedding small objects, and the video began to glitch out as that plasma buildup interrupted transmission. At about 40 miles above the Indian Ocean, flight data stopped updating; the last figures downlinked showed Starship still traveling at almost 16,000 miles an hour.  

“We are making the call now that we have lost Ship 28,” SpaceX commentator Dan Huot said minutes later, referring to the large number of Starship upper stages SpaceX has already built. “No splashdown today, but again, it’s incredible to see how much further we got this time around.”

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson soon tweeted his congratulations, writing “Congrats to @SpaceX on a successful test flight!” in a post on X. “Together, we are making great strides through Artemis to return humanity to the Moon—then look onward to Mars.”

The space agency has much riding on Starship. It awarded SpaceX a $2.89 billion contract in April 2021 to build a version of that vehicle’s upper stage to land astronauts on the Moon as part of its Artemis project. With refueling in orbit, Starship can send more than 110 tons of payload to the Moon, per a 2020 SpaceX document (PDF), far more than the 30 tons the initial version of NASA’s Space Launch System can send there.

(NASA has since awarded a second, $3.4 billion lunar lander contract to Blue Origin, the space firm founded by Jeff Bezos that has staged dozens of suborbital flights but has yet to fly its New Glenn heavy-lift rocket.) 

And the Airbus-Voyager Space team vying to win NASA’s business to replace the International Space Station with a privately built station plans to launch its Starlab facility fully assembled on a future Starship flight. 

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk—taking a break from a recent run of posts on X denouncing “wokeness” and sharing conspiracy lies about immigration—emphasized how much more ambitious his own goals are for this project, sharing a photo of the launch and writing that “Starship will make life multiplanetary.”

Editors’ note: We updated this story with more details from SpaceX and mission observers.