SpaceX Hits Major Milestone, Launching Starship Into Orbit for First Time

Despite an engine shutting down too soon, Elon Musk’s SpaceX managed to get its Starship into Earth orbit for the first time ever and also deploy dozens of Starlink’s most advanced satellites into orbit on Monday.

The noncrewed orbit was planned to last 10 hours — consisting of six laps around Earth — but the SpaceX control team decided to cut the flight to three hours. After reentering Earth’s atmosphere, the Starship splashed down in the Pacific Ocean north of Hawaii at 11:58 a.m. ET, tipping over and erupting into flames.

The Starship launched at 8:48 a.m. ET at SpaceX’s Starbase in Boca Chica Beach, Texas.

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For the most part, it was mission accomplished for the 14th launch of the Starship, which, at 407 feet tall, is the largest launch vehicle ever designed, 44 feet taller than NASA’s retired Saturn V. After reaching orbit Monday, the Starship jettisoned 26 of the newest and most updated Starlink satellites into orbit, adding to the more than 11,000 already floating around above.

The Starship reached an altitude of 170 miles and sped along at 17,500 mph.

Of the previous 13 Starship test flights, several ended in crashes over the Indian Ocean, either intentionally caused by SpaceX or accidentally. No one has ever been hurt by the crashes.

Monday’s achievement almost didn’t happen. Before reaching orbit, one of the Starship’s more than three dozen engines went kaput, but SpaceX engineers decided to continue the flight after conferring for several minutes. SpaceX did not say whether the engine shutdown was a factor in the decision to reduce the trip from 10 hours to three.

Ultimately, Musk and SpaceX want the Starship to be fully reusable to save on launch costs — what goes up will come down intact. If all goes as planned, the first-stage booster that provides lift-off thrust would return to the launch site after separating from the main Starship. The Starship would also return to Earth, landing vertically.

Although Musk originally eyed the Starship as a method to reach Mars — and possibly carry humans there as colonists — his primary goal now is to keep putting Starlink satellites into orbit, more than 100,000 of them. SpaceX is planning to add two more launch sites: one at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center and another in Vermilion Parish along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana.

SpaceX wants to have the Starship certified by NASA in time for the agency’s Artemis III mission, which could be next summer. In that mission, a NASA Orion capsule with astronauts on board will dock with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Moon and later with Musk’s Starship.

In the Artemis IV mission, slated for 2028 at the earliest, astronauts will land on the moon in either the Blue Moon or Starship. The overall plan is for moon landings to alternate between the two spacecraft on subsequent trips.