On its first test flight Thursday morning, SpaceX's massive, uncrewed Starship rocket roared off the launch pad, soared into the south Texas sky for a few minutes, but ultimately exploded into a trail of smoke.
The explosive end to the test — the latest in the company’s yearslong development program, but the first with the Starship spacecraft stacked atop the rocket’s Super Heavy first-stage booster — beat SpaceX’s publicly broadcast goals. The company had been careful to set expectations low for this flight. SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk told an audience at a Morgan Stanley conference last month that the rocket’s debut had a 50% chance of success.
"Success today is anything that we learn that helps improve the future builds of Starship," Kate Tice, SpaceX quality systems engineering manager, said on the company's launch webcast. "If we lift off and clear the pad, we're going to have a win."
The Starship rocket — currently the most powerful in the world — lifted off from the company's launch site near Boca Chica, Texas, around 7:33 a.m. Central time. After passing through the moment of peak mechanical stress on the rocket, the Starship spacecraft was set to separate from the Super Heavy first-stage booster.
But instead of separating, the still-conjoined rocket tumbled head over head before it ultimately exploded.
Stacked together, the two-part rocket stands nearly 400 feet tall and can carry more than 220,000 pounds. It has about twice the thrust of the Apollo-era Saturn V rocket that ferried astronauts to the moon. The Super Heavy first-stage booster is powered by 33 individual engines.
Musk congratulated the team on the launch via Twitter, saying they "learned a lot for next test launch in a few months."
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson didn’t seem too concerned about the outcome of Thursday’s test flight, tweeting: “Every great achievement throughout history has demanded some level of calculated risk, because with great risk comes great reward. Looking forward to all that SpaceX learns, to the next flight test — and beyond.” SpaceX is under contract with NASA to develop Starship as a lunar lander for the Artemis moon program.
Starship also is crucial to the future of Musk’s SpaceX.
Although SpaceX built its reputation and manifest on the smaller Falcon 9 rocket, the company needs to expand its business beyond launches. That's where Starship comes in.
The Hawthorne, California, company has already launched thousands of small satellites as part of its Starlink broadband internet constellation and offers service to the U.S. and countries around the globe. But those initial, smaller satellites are not advanced enough to fully implement SpaceX's goal of being a major player in the broadband market.
SpaceX plans to launch more capable versions of the Starlink satellites that are larger and would require many more launches if flown on a Falcon 9 rocket. But with Starship's carrying capacity, the company would be able to launch more satellites at a time, allowing SpaceX to build its broadband capacity faster and serve more customers.
Starlink is an important part of SpaceX's plans for generating revenue. Musk told reporters in 2019 that revenue from providing internet service could total $30 billion a year, while launch revenue would top out at about $3 billion a year.
That kind of money is important for Musk's ultimate goal — launching humans to Mars, which also requires Starship to ferry travelers to the red planet.
In the meantime, Starship already has missions closer to home on its docket. The rocket has been bought out by several billionaires for private spaceflights, including one intended to circle the moon that's funded by Japanese fashion mogul Yusaku Maezawa.
Thursday’s launch came after a scrub Monday morning, when SpaceX delayed the launch due to a valve issue with the rocket.
Had the test mission gone off without a hitch, the Starship spacecraft would have separated from the Super Heavy booster and continued its ascent before coming back and hitting the Pacific Ocean in a “water landing” that would have intentionally exploded the spacecraft on impact, with most pieces expected to sink, according to a Federal Aviation Administration launch evaluation. The Super Heavy booster was intended to return to the Gulf of Mexico, where it would have landed vertically in the water.
The company first started testing Starship's components in earnest in July 2019, when the company launched its short, stubby prototype, Starhopper, on brief, upward trajectories into the air. SpaceX then progressed to launch and landing tests of the Starship spacecraft, a static fire test of the Super Heavy rocket booster and other simulations.
