SpaceX’s Starship rocket, the largest and most powerful in history, successfully completed its third launch yesterday after the first two attempts ended in explosions. But the ship that the rocket had launched, also called Starship, which was without a crew yesterday, but in which astronauts will travel in the future, was lost re-entering the atmosphere.
The partial success of the mission is a relief for NASA, which depends on Starship for the return of astronauts to the lunar surface, scheduled for September 2026. By Elon Musk, founder and leader of SpaceX, it is a step forward in shielding hegemony in the global satellite launch market.
The rocket took off at 14.25 (Spanish peninsular time) from the SpaceX launch base in Boca Chica, in southern Texas (USA). Two minutes and 44 seconds later, he had successfully completed the separation maneuver of the two rocket modules. After seven minutes, the lower module docked in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, something that had not been achieved in the previous two launches and was celebrated with applause in the SpaceX control center.
The mission was supposed to end around 3:30 p.m., when the upper module was supposed to fall into the Indian Ocean northeast of Madagascar after reaching 234 kilometers of altitude. But contact with the ship was lost during the descent, when it was 65 kilometers from the surface and flying at 25,707 kilometers per hour.
In the previous minutes it had been possible to see in the streaming broadcast of SpaceX, which offered images from a camera installed on board the Starship, how hundreds of fragments came off the exterior of the ship, which is protected by a heat shield.
It had also been possible to appreciate how plasma flames formed around the Starship due to the heating produced by re-entry into the atmosphere, a phase of the mission in which the temperature of the exterior of the ship rose at about 1,500 degrees Celsius.
The sequence recalled the explosion of Columbia, the shuttle that disintegrated in 2001 with seven astronauts on board returning to Earth due to a breach in the heat shield. In the absence of telemetry data to clarify what happened to the Starship, indications are that it has disintegrated. “We have lost the ship”, confirmed a spokesman for SpaceX at 3.31 pm.
During launch, the rocket’s lower module, a silver cylinder called Superheavies, provided the thrust necessary for liftoff and ascent into the lower atmosphere.
If in the previous two launches the Superheavy module exploded before the end of the mission, yesterday it accurately performed the planned tasks, which indicates that SpaceX engineers have managed to solve many of the critical problems. The docking in the Gulf of Mexico, however, occurred in a poorly controlled manner at about a thousand kilometers per hour.
The upper module, called Starship, like the whole of the rocket, is a black ship that will be able to transport astronauts, satellites or any other cargo. It had barely been able to be tested in previous launches and the fact that it did not pass the atmospheric re-entry test yesterday indicates that it is not yet ready.
This is the ship in which the astronauts of NASA’s Artemis 3 mission will reach the lunar surface in 2026, the first to set foot on the Moon since the end of the Apollo program in 1972, and in which they will then return to Earth. Doubts about the guarantees offered by Starship to resist re-entry into the atmosphere is one of the main reasons that have led NASA to delay the Artemis 3 mission to the last four months of 2026.
The director of NASA, Bill Nelson, yesterday congratulated SpaceX on the social network X for “a successful test flight”.
The two modules are nine meters in diameter and between them reach 122 meters in height, making the Starship the largest rocket ever built. It is also the most powerful, with the ability to place payloads of up to 150 tons into low Earth orbit.
Both modules are designed to be recovered and reused, just like SpaceX’s previous rocket components. With this strategy, Elon Musk’s company has managed to lower the cost of launches and dominate the world rocket market, at the expense of – among others – the European Ariane rockets.
Starship will allow SpaceX to further lower costs at a time when the number of satellites being put into orbit is increasing. For Elon Musk, it will also allow to accelerate the deployment of the Starlink satellite constellation, which aims to offer internet connectivity from anywhere in the world.
The first Starship launch, in April 2023, ended catastrophically with the explosion of the rocket four minutes after liftoff without the two modules having separated.
In the second launch, in November, the modules came apart, but both ended up exploding in the air.
SpaceX presented both launches as successes, as they allowed for improvement through lessons learned. SpaceX’s method consists precisely of testing rockets and ships in extreme situations in order to improve them based on mistakes.
The third release has proposed more ambitious goals than the first two. This time, the goals included a fuel transfer operation during the mission, the first reignition of a Raptor engine (the new engines that SpaceX has developed for the Starship), and opening and closing the cargo hold door ( a maneuver necessary to place satellites in orbit).
After yesterday’s launch, SpaceX intends to make “at least six more flights this year”, as announced by Elon Musk on the X social network.
These launches, and others to come over the next two years, will need to increase Starship’s reliability and demonstrate that it can safely take astronauts to the Moon and return them to Earth.
