Starship brought the thunder as it climbed into space for the first time

BOCA CHICA BEACH, Texas—SpaceX’s Starship mega-rocket reached space for the first time Saturday, flying straight and true for more than eight minutes before exploding nearly 100 miles over the Gulf of Mexico downrange from the company’s South Texas launch base.

With this test flight, SpaceX made important steps forward with Starship, the largest rocket ever built. This is the fully reusable launch vehicle Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, says is crucial to his vision of establishing a settlement on Mars. In the nearer term, once Starship is flight proven, SpaceX plans to use the rocket to launch massive payloads of numerous Starlink Internet satellites. NASA has a pair of contracts with SpaceX worth more than $4 billion to use a variant of Starship to land astronauts on the Moon. Private space travelers have also signed up to fly on Starship.

But those ambitions hinge on getting Starship into orbit, which hasn’t happened yet. The flight profile for Saturday’s test launch, designated Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2), should have taken the unpiloted Starship on a trajectory to fly most of the way around the world before a targeted reentry and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii. In the end, the rocket didn’t reach this objective, but the results Saturday were promising.

“We got the hot staging, the thing that we really wanted to see and test,” said John Insprucker, a senior SpaceX engineer providing commentary during the company’s official live broadcast of the test flight. “We saw the separation, we saw the flip maneuver, we saw the light-up of the six Raptor engines on Starship.”

Musk called the giant launcher a “magnificent machine” in a post on his social media site, X.

“Congrats to the teams who made progress on today’s flight test,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson wrote on X. “Spaceflight is a bold adventure demanding a can-do spirit and daring innovation. Today’s test is an opportunity to learn—then fly again.”

The rocket is divided into two segments. A booster stage called Super Heavy with 33 Raptor engines is designed to power the vehicle through Earth’s atmosphere, then an upper stage with six engines—known simply as Starship—takes over to accelerate to orbital velocity. On operational missions, the Starship upper stage could serve as a propellant tanker, depot, payload deployer, or a crew and passenger cabin.

The first full-scale Starship test launch in April revealed several shortcomings in SpaceX’s design, including fuel leaks, engine failures, and extensive damage to the launch pad. This wouldn’t be a surprise for the first test flight of any new rocket, but SpaceX’s preference to learn this way—through rapid-fire flight demonstrations and iteration—is intended to help engineers identify problems earlier in development than if they followed a development approach used by the traditional aerospace industry. This usually results in a faster path from concept to operations.

In the seven months since the first Starship test flight, SpaceX redesigned and rebuilt part of the launch pad, introduced a new stage separation method to separate the rocket’s Super Heavy booster from its upper stage, and made reliability improvements to Starship’s methane-fueled Raptor engines.

The booster and ship both had a chance to shine Saturday. The rocket took off from SpaceX’s privately owned launch site on the Texas Gulf Coast, just north of the US-Mexico border, after a brief hold in the countdown. The 397-foot-tall (121-meter) stainless steel launch vehicle ignited its 33 engines and climbed off the launch pad at 7:03 am CST (13:03 UTC).

Burning blue

SpaceX had never before successfully ignited all 33 Raptor engines at once on a Super Heavy booster stage. At least five engines failed on the first Starship test launch in April, and multiple engines misfired on this Super Heavy booster during hold-down test-firings in August.

The simultaneous ignition of all 33 engines was something SpaceX engineers were certainly elated to see. No rocket has ever fired so many engines together. The 33 Raptors put on a show, consuming more than 40,000 pounds of propellant per second and generating nearly 17 million pounds of thrust. A 1,000-foot tongue of fiery blue-orange exhaust trailed behind Starship as it rocketed into a clear sky just after sunrise.

Moments later, a deep rumble reached onlookers, including this Ars reporter, perched less than four miles from the launch pad. The rumble grew into a crackling thunder a few moments later. It’s no surprise the world’s largest rocket is also the loudest.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1985247