SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas — SpaceX’s Starship megarocket, the world’s largest and most powerful rocket, reached orbital speed for the first time during its historic third test flight from South Texas on Thursday.
Hundreds of Spring Break spectators, rocket launch followers and SpaceX fans gathered along the southern shores of South Padre Island and surrounding areas to witness the third test flight of the largest rocket ever built. About 5 miles (8 kilometers) south of the crowd, SpaceX’s massive Starship vehicle lifted off from the company’s production and test launch facilities near Boca Chica Beach at 9:25 a.m. EDT (1325 GMT) this morning (March 14).
SpaceX founder Elon Musk said “Starship reached orbital speed” Announced on X (formerly Twitter) after takeoff. “Congratulations SpaceX team!!” The launch took place on the 22nd anniversary of SpaceX’s founding in 2002, the company said.
Neither the Starship vehicle nor its Super Heavy booster survived to the intended landing, but SpaceX officials said the test flight achieved many key goals during the flight.
Cheers erupted from the crowd in South Padre as the dim morning sky lit up as Starship’s 33 first-stage Raptor engines ignited, quickly engulfing nearly the entire craft in a cloud of dust and smoke. Seconds later, the 400-foot (122-meter) rocket rose from the cloud and rapidly increased its climb into the sky.
“This flight has almost just begun, but we’re further than we’ve ever been before,” SpaceX spokesman Dan Huot said live on air shortly after liftoff. “We have a starship not only in space, but also in the shore phase into space.”
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Today’s launch, called Integrated Flight Test-3 (IFT-3), was the third test mission of the fully stowed Starship. The first and second Starship launches both ended explosively last year, with the vehicles exploding before completing each flight’s mission objectives. But the data collected during these first flights helped SpaceX engineers prepare Starship for future success.
Among the improvements made between IFT-1 and IFT-2 last year was the implementation of the “hot phasing” technique, in which the upper stage engines begin firing before Starship’s first stage booster, known as the Super Heavy, is fully separated. IFT-2’s hot staging maneuver was as successful as it is today.
High in the sky, Starship’s two stages separated approximately 2 minutes and 45 seconds after liftoff, sending the 165-foot-tall (50 m) upper stage spacecraft toward space while the Super Heavy began preparations for a rebound burn to redirect its orbit. The poststage burn reversed the Super Heavy’s speed, and a landing burn over the Gulf of Mexico was scheduled to follow minutes later. However, it appears that the Super Heavy’s engines did not restart as planned, leading to the loss of the booster.
“It didn’t start all the engines we expected and we lost the thruster,” Huot said. “Of course, we will have to review the data to understand exactly what happened.”
Starship is designed to be completely reusable, and SpaceX plans to land and restart its Super Heavy boosters, as it did with the Falcon 9 rockets. In the future, two “rod” arms on Starship’s launch tower will catch the returning Super Heavy booster for landing, but IFT-3’s Super Heavy was always expected to splash down into the Gulf.
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Starship’s upper stage continued flying after separation but did not attempt to enter full orbit. Instead, the spacecraft entered the suborbital shore phase as it hovered over Earth; Meanwhile, SpaceX hoped to demonstrate two of the spacecraft’s vehicle-qualifying flight systems—restarting Starship’s Raptor engines and transferring cryogenic fuel between tanks. Following these demonstrations, the spacecraft was expected to land in the Indian Ocean approximately 65 minutes after launch, but SpaceX lost contact with the Ship during re-entry.
“We are calling now because we lost Ship 28,” Huot said, referring to the Starship vehicle number after a long period without telemetry connection with the vehicle. “We had no word from the ship up to this point and so the team called the Ship lost. That’s why there is no splashdown today.”
Fast progress is needed for Starship, which is on the critical path for NASA’s Artemis 3 mission. Artemis 3 aims to land the first humans on the moon since the end of the Apollo era in the early 1970s. Artemis 3 is currently scheduled for 2026, giving Starship less than two years to meet NASA vehicle qualifications for astronauts to land on the lunar surface.
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SpaceX also has other plans for Starship. The company is relying on Starship’s unique payload capacity to launch the next generation of Starlink internet satellites. Other Starship flights have been purchased by private entities, including Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa’s Dear Moon mission, which aims to fly him and eight others around our nearest celestial neighbor.
Starship’s success today likely signals an increase in the number of launches at SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility. Equipment needed to build a second launch tower at the site has begun arriving for assembly, and the infrastructure supporting NASA’s Starship launches from Kennedy Space Center in Florida is also in good shape.
A faster launch pace would accelerate Starship’s astronaut-carrying proficiency by NASA, but meeting NASA’s ambitious Artemis 3 timeline may still be a bit of a stretch. But SpaceX is no stranger to fast launch tempos. In steady operation for more than a decade, the company’s Falcon 9 rocket has broken its own annual launch record every year and is poised to break it again in 2024.
Starship was designed with faster reusability in mind. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said the company aims to eventually launch, land and restart multiple Starship vehicles every day.