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SpaceX's Starship goes orbital, deploying first next-gen Starlinks
Starship had already flown 99 percent of the way to low-Earth orbit. Monday’s flight added the last bit.
SpaceX’s Starship rocket thundered into the sky over South Texas early Monday. It was the 14th test flight of the world’s most powerful launch vehicle. This time, however, the rocket’s massive upper stage squeezed out some extra oomph from its Raptor engines and accelerated to orbital velocity.
On all of Starship’s previous flights, SpaceX intentionally dialed back the full capability of the rocket to fly a suborbital trajectory, slow enough for Earth’s gravity to pull the vehicle back into the atmosphere before it could complete a full lap around the planet. After several successful suborbital flights in a row, SpaceX officials decided this launch should go all the way to low-Earth orbit. And it did.
What’s more, SpaceX packed 26 of the company’s newest generation of Starlink broadband satellites into the rocket’s cargo bay. One by one, the flat-packed satellites—too large to fit inside SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket—were released from Starship’s payload deployer using a system of pulleys and cables to eject the satellites overboard like a Pez dispenser spits out candy.
Starship Flight 14 began with a booming sendoff from Starbase, Texas, at 8:49 am EDT (7:49 am local time; 12:49 UTC) as 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines pushed the 407-foot-tall (124-meter) rocket off its launch pad. The engines generated up to 18 million pounds of thrust to propel the fuel-laden rocket into the sky over Starbase, SpaceX’s private spaceport just north of the US-Mexico border.
Heading east from South Texas, the rocket powered through the speed of sound and soared into the stratosphere before its Super Heavy booster stage detached from Starship’s upper stage. The booster executed a rapid high-altitude turnaround to begin thrusting back toward the Texas coast. Several minutes later, the Super Heavy first stage made a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico just off the coast of Starbase.
The upper stage continued its climb into space before shutting off its Raptor engines a little more than eight minutes into the fight. Up to this point, the rocket followed a similar trajectory as SpaceX’s previous Starship test flights.
The company’s flight control team had a few minutes to decide whether to proceed with the next phase of the flight: a restart of one of Starship’s Raptor engines to add the final bit of speed required to reach orbital velocity. For a brief period, it appeared as if SpaceX was going to forego the orbital flight and allow Starship to continue coasting toward a reentry over the Indian Ocean, as it had done many times before.
The question of what to do next centered on the performance of the rocket’s Raptor engines. One of the six Raptors on Starship shut down prematurely during its ascent burn, and the five others burned longer to compensate for the malfunction. Less of a worry for Starship’s orbital flight, but still a concern for future launches, was the apparent failure of two of the 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster—one during launch and another during the booster’s return maneuvers.
Dan Huot, a SpaceX commentator providing live updates on the company’s webcast of Monday’s flight, initially reported that mission managers were going to abort the orbit insertion burn. Officials ultimately decided to proceed. The failed Raptor engine was not the same one that needed to fire to place the rocket into low-Earth orbit and steer it toward reentry and splashdown at the end of the flight.