SpaceX's Starship V3—still a work in progress—mostly successful on first flight - Ars Technica
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SpaceX launched the first test flight of its upgraded Starship rocket and Super Heavy booster Friday, with mostly positive results.
The powerful rocket, propelled by 33 methane-fueled main engines, climbed away from SpaceX’s Starbase launch facility in South Texas at 5:30 pm CDT (6:30 pm EDT; 22:30 UTC) Friday. Within a few seconds, the 408-foot-tall (124-meter) rocket, the largest ever built, cleared the launch tower and turned onto an eastward heading over the Gulf of Mexico.
Starship splashed down on target in the Indian Ocean a little more than an hour later to conclude the first flight of the latest version of SpaceX’s stainless steel mega-rocket. Starship V3 fared better on its debut than the first flights of Starship V1 and V2 in 2023 and 2025. Both past versions of Starship broke apart during launch on their inaugural flights.
SpaceX officials appeared pleased with the performance of Starship V3 on Friday. Elon Musk, the company’s founder and CEO, congratulated his engineers with a post on X: “Congratulations SpaceX team on an epic first Starship V3 launch & landing! You scored a goal for humanity.”
“Congrats and a huge thank you to the SpaceX team that always delivers,” Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s second in command, wrote in an X post. “This was an incredible first flight of a brand new vehicle. Our collective future flying amongst the stars has become so much closer.”
Leaders at NASA, relying on SpaceX to provide Starship as a human-rated Moon lander, were closely watching the launch. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman was in Texas to witness the launch in person. He lauded SpaceX for a “hell of a V3 Starship launch.”
Starship’s 12th test flight was a long time coming. The last Starship test flight took off last October. The gap of more than seven months was the longest interval between Starship flights since the program’s first full-scale launch in April 2023. SpaceX used the time to complete construction and activation of a second launch pad at Starbase as engineers steered Starship V3 through ground testing, which had its own share of setbacks.
Starship climbs away from Starbase, Texas, after liftoff at 5:30 pm local time Friday.
Credit:<br>SpaceX
Starship climbs away from Starbase, Texas, after liftoff at 5:30 pm local time Friday.
Credit:
SpaceX
What was good?
So what worked on Friday’s test flight? Plenty. Most importantly, the ship’s heat shield appeared to hold up during reentry over the Indian Ocean. Onboard cameras showed the vehicle’s aerodynamic flaps intact throughout the fiery descent through the atmosphere. The heat shield and flaps didn’t always fare so well on past Starship test flights. Starship executed a series of banking maneuvers on the way toward the splashdown zone northwest of Australia, simulating the path future ships will take returning to landings at Starbase.
That all went well, with the descent culminating in a dramatic maneuver to flip from horizontal to vertical. A final landing burn with the ship’s Raptor engines downshifted from three to two, then to a single engine as the rocket settled to a gentle water landing. Drones and buoy cameras recorded live views of the on-target splashdown. As expected, the ship—wider than and nearly as long a Boeing 777 jetliner—tipped over and exploded in a fireball, putting an exclamation point on V3’s trip halfway around the world from the Texas Gulf Coast.
Earlier in the flight, SpaceX demonstrated Starship V3’s improved payload deployment mechanism. The system is tailored for releasing SpaceX’s flat-packed Starlink Internet satellites. SpaceX tested the Pez-like deployment system on past test flights, but upgrades on Starship V3 allow the mechanism to release satellites at a faster rate. On Friday, the dispenser deployed 20 mockups of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink satellites, plus two spacecraft fitted with flashlights and cameras to inspect Starship’s exterior in space.
All of this worked perfectly as the ship soared to a maximum altitude of 121 miles (195 kilometers) in darkness over the South Atlantic Ocean. SpaceX says this version of Starship can haul up to 100 metric tons of payload into low-Earth orbit, more than double the capacity of Starship V2.
Meanwhile, initial inspections of SpaceX’s new launch pad at Starbase, used for the first time Friday, showed the facility weathered the intensity of liftoff with no significant problems. This is a promising sign for SpaceX’s...