It flew for 50 minutes, then lost signal and ship during atmospheric re-entry, which it did not survive. But first, she was a succession of ovations from Starbase, SpaceX’s Boca Chica space base. Starship took off from the Texas coast on top of the most powerful rocket ever built, and reached space and orbital velocity, a first ever achieved in the previous two tests. Then nothing more, when he was at 65 kilometers above sea level. She was due to crash into the Indian Ocean about 15 minutes later. But for SpaceX engineers and Elon Musk it was still a success from which to learn to make changes and try a new launch as soon as possible.
Takeoff at 2.30pm in Italy. Then it begins to fall in an attempt to ditch
Two minutes and 40 seconds after take-off, around 2.30pm Italian time, the spaceship that will have to take humanity back to the Moon and then, perhaps, also to Mars, separated from its booster to set off towards space. The Super Heavy, the first stage, then began to fall in an attempt to make a soft landing. But from the images it immediately became clear that something, arriving a few meters from the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, did not work. The telemetries will tell the technicians what needs to be reviewed, but this is also considered a step forward, because for the first time its fate did not end with a controlled explosion.
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All this was happening while Starship became “the largest object to ever fly,” as Musk himself chirped on X. At five thousand tons, the spaceship reached orbital velocity. It means that by continuing, she could have remained in orbit around the Earth. But those weren’t the plans.
Musk: ““The largest object to ever fly”
Its destiny was in fact a suborbital flight of just over an hour, during which it reached an altitude of 234 kilometers. During which he tested two important processes. The opening of the cargo hatch, with which in the future you will release the Starlink satellites and the loads that will be entrusted to you, and a fuel exchange system between tanks. A prototype for in-orbit refueling technology. It is not yet clear what the result of this test is, as well as the functioning of the Raptor engines, turned off and then back on, in the vacuum of space.
Now all that remains is to wait for the data that arrived at SpaceX through the connection with the Starlink satellites which during the flight sent telemetries and spectacular images seen by over four million people during the live broadcast on Starship and its ailerons enveloped in an aura of incandescent plasma. Just before everything went dark and Starship was destroyed before reaching the final objective.