SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft landed in the Indian Ocean on Friday after the company conducted a highly successful test flight of the latest version of its massive rocket.
The trip was not without some technical glitches, but SpaceX employees shown on a livestream roared with joy after the test flight that comes as the Elon Musk-owned company prepares a potentially record-breaking initial public offering.
The gigantic rocket took off into space shortly after 5:30 p.m. local time (22:30 GMT).
The company had no intention of recovering the booster or upper stage, and the final landing was intense but controlled, as planned.
“Dressing confirmed!” the company wrote in X.
SpaceX’s main objective was to demonstrate its redesigns in flight.
The third-generation Starship spacecraft performed a maneuver in which it turned upright and restarted its engines to control them, even though one was out of service.
It also deployed its 22 simulated satellites, including two that attempted to photograph the spacecraft’s heat shield for analysis.
The vehicle had traveled through space but wasn’t exactly in the right orbit after one of its engines failed during an initial burn.
“I wouldn’t call it nominal orbital insertion,” said company spokesman Dan Huot, adding however that it was “within the limits” of a previously analyzed trajectory.
After the Super Heavy booster separated from the upper stage as expected, Huot said on the livestream that the booster was unable to complete its so-called recoil boost.
The booster quickly fell to Earth, uncontrolled, in the Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX wasn’t planning to recover the booster anyway, but was still hoping for an accurate return.
Musk applauded his team at X and called the flight “epic.”
“You scored a goal for humanity,” he said.
“A long way to go”
Friday’s flight followed an aborted test a day earlier.
The countdown stopped and started until it was determined that last-minute red flags could not be addressed in time.
Musk quickly posted on X that “the hydraulic pin holding the tower arm in place did not retract.” SpaceX said the problem was corrected overnight.
The company faces additional scrutiny after SpaceX filed with U.S. financial regulators earlier this week to go public, likely in June, in what is expected to become a record initial public offering.
Friday marks Starship’s 12th flight overall, but the first in seven months.
The latest design is larger than its predecessor, measuring just over 407 feet (124 meters) when fully stacked.
There’s a lot riding on SpaceX’s progress: The company has a contract with NASA to produce a modified version of Starship to serve as a lunar landing system.
The US space agency’s Artemis program aims to return humans to the Moon, while China presses ahead with a rival effort targeting 2030 for its first crewed mission.
Clayton Swope, an aerospace expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told AFP that “the upgraded version of Starship did most of what SpaceX expected it to do during launch.”
But he noted that considerable time has passed since the last test flight.
NASA aims to test an in-orbit encounter between its spacecraft and at least one lunar lander in 2027, which both SpaceX and its rival Blue Origin, the company owned by Jeff Bezos, are competing to develop.
This Artemis phase is intended to be a step towards carrying out a manned moon landing before the end of 2028 and before the end of Donald Trump’s presidency.
But for Swope, “there is a long way to go and many more test flights before Starship is ready for the next Artemis mission.”
Ahead of Friday’s test, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman appeared during SpaceX’s pre-launch show and said, “We’re looking forward to this flight, because we hope that at some point in the not-too-distant future we’ll be joining Earth’s orbit.”
After the test, Isaacman praised X, congratulating SpaceX on “an incredible launch of a V3 spacecraft.”
“One step closer to the Moon… one step closer to Mars,” the NASA official said.
