SpaceX’s Starship hit its marks for the second time in a row on Monday night. That version of the company’s giant rocket won’t have another chance to fly successfully, though, because SpaceX has an upgraded configuration coming soon-ish.
Last night, however, Starship’s 11th launch began at 6:23 Central time from its Starbase facility near Boca Chica, Texas. It was the second liftoff for the 403-foot-tall rocket’s first stage, which flew before on Starship’s eighth launch.
The 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines on the vehicle’s booster sent it through stage separation—a tricky “hotstaging” process in which the second stage’s engines light before the booster gets cut loose, blasting through a vented interstage ring.
Starship’s booster did not fly itself back to be caught by metal arms on its launch tower as it had on that March test flight, instead using successively smaller subsets of its engines in a test of its landing capabilities before a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
Starship’s upper stage continued a climb to space on its six Raptor engines to begin a suborbital trajectory toward a splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
Three of the four previous flights of this Block 2 configuration of Starship, following six tests of the initial version, ended in failures of this stage: It exploded in the upper atmosphere on the seventh and eighth Starship launches, then tumbled out of control on the ninth mission and disintegrated on re-entry. In addition, the second-stage design suffered a failure on the ground in June when one exploded during fueling for a static-fire test of its engines.
Starship’s methane fuel leave a vivid purple exhaust. (Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
On Monday’s flight, the upper stage’s coast in space featured a successful deployment of simulated Starlink satellites, a sequel to a test on Starship’s 10th test flight in August. SpaceX is banking on Starship’s ability to deliver larger, more capable versions of those low-Earth-orbit broadband satellites.
This launch did not put anything into orbit, like earlier flights in a Starship test campaign that began in April 2023. That’s one major way in which this program departs from SpaceX’s earlier efforts: Its pioneering Falcon 1 reached orbit on its fourth try, and its workhorse Falcon 9 did so on its debut in 2010.
While above Earth, Starship’s upper stage also relit one engine in space, a test of its ability to maneuver in orbit, and then began a fiery fall through the upper atmosphere.
SpaceX launch commentator Dan Huot reminded viewers that the company had removed some of the vehicle’s heat-shielding tiles in a further experiment: “We’re really trying to stress some of the most sensitive areas around Starship.”
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But the stage survived re-entry as seen in a video livestreamed via Starlink, performing a series of banking turns as if it were returning for a launch-tower catch. As planned, the stage splashed down in the Indian Ocean; moments later, it tipped over and exploded.
SpaceX is already building the first in a series of taller and more powerful Block 3 Starships, which Huot described as “the Starship we’re planning to use for all of our next major milestones.”
He and other SpaceX commentators noted the importance of that design. The version that the company aims to launch in the coming months—with a payload that CEO Elon Musk said in a May presentation could reach 220 tons in a fully reusable configuration, up from the 165 tons the company projects for the current version—is in the critical path of Musk’s ambitions to send cargo and then people to the Moon and Mars.
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Six engines going up, three going down (Credit: Rob Pegoraro)
That first and closer destination also has extreme relevance to SpaceX’s most important customer, NASA. The space agency awarded the company a $2.89 billion contract in 2021—later revised to $4 billion, with $2.7 billion paid so far—to develop a variant of Starship’s upper stage as a human lunar lander for its Artemis missions to the Moon.
NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy posted a note of confidence on X after Monday’s flight test: “Another major step toward landing Americans on the Moon’s south pole.”
SpaceX’s concept of operations for Starship lunar landings, however, requires multiple orbital refuelings of this Human Landing System version. Even for an organization with SpaceX’s record of success, that will be a difficult task to execute once, much less many times in a row.
NASA inked a second lunar-lander contract with Blue Origin in 2023, a $3.4 billion award for a Blue Moon Mark 2 vehicle to be launched on its New Glenn rocket. That will require its own complicated in-orbit refueling.
China, meanwhile, has kept on advancing its own conceptually simpler plans to land people on the Moon before 2030.
In early October, Ars Technica’s well-sourced space reporter Eric Berger reported that NASA was looking at a Plan C: having Blue Origin adapt its smaller Blue Moon Mark 1 cargo lunar lander to carry astronauts to the moon. That concept would not require refueling in space and could yield better odds of the US returning humans to the Moon before China does that for its first time. But it would also demand that the Jeff Bezos-owned company move at much more of a SpaceX pace.
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Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.
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