SpaceX launches uncrewed Starship on mission closely watched by NASA

With each flight test, Starship has flown further and completed more milestones. On this flight, Elon Musk’s company is focused not only on achieving an orbital trajectory, but also on controlling the Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft as they re-enter the atmosphere. Controlled re-entries will help SpaceX reach its ultimate goal flying the two, which are collectively known as the Starship, back to their launch site so they can be reused. The company reuses its Falcon 9 rocket booster, but not the second stage. Starship is intended to be fully reusable.

On Thursday’s test flight, the booster and spacecraft successfully separated nearly three minutes after liftoff. The booster then flew back to a designated location in the Gulf of Mexico, fired 13 of its engines to slow itself down, and gently landed on water as part of a demonstration of how it would land back at its launch site in the future.

“Ideally, we expect Starship reentry to improve on each flight thanks in part to this wealth of new data,” SpaceX’s Jessie Anderson said during the company’s mission broadcast. “But if getting to space is hard, coming back from space is even harder.”

NASA is paying close attention to the development of Starship, which is at the center of the space agency’s flagship lunar campaign, known as Artemis. In 2021, the space agency awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to use the vehicle to fly astronauts to the surface of the Moon. Since then, SpaceX won another contract, worth just over $1 billion, for another crewed lunar landing.

However, to reach the Moon, Starship’s propulsion tanks would have to be refueled by a fleet of tanker spacecraft that would launch in sequence and dock with the spacecraft in low Earth orbit, a complicated task that has not been accomplished never before.

For now, NASA hopes to use Starship to land humans on the moon for the first time since the last Apollo mission in 1972 by the end of 2026. But that timeline is uncertain given the amount of development that must be completed by SpaceX to ensure that Starship is safe for human spaceflight. The delay is also due to concerns about the heat shield of the spacecraft, called Orion, that would fly crews from the Moon back to Earth.

NASA has also awarded Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Jeff Bezos, a contract to build a spacecraft to land astronauts on the Moon. A company official told CBS’ “60 Minutes” that it aims to land a variant of its lunar lander designed to carry cargo, but not people, to the moon next year. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Since Starship’s last flight in March, the company said, “several software and hardware improvements have been made to increase overall reliability and address lessons learned from Flight 3.”

That test mission reached space and the spacecraft successfully separated and traveled more than half way around the globe.

But as its engines shut down and it began coasting, “the vehicle began to lose the ability to control its attitude,” or its orientation, the company said. It continued along its normal trajectory, but “lack of attitude control” affected reentry and the spacecraft experienced “much greater than expected heating in shielded and unprotected areas.” The spacecraft is coated with heat shield plates to protect it from the extreme temperatures generated during reentry.

Eventually, the spacecraft burned up 40 miles over the Indian Ocean, about 49 minutes into the flight.

Despite the failure, the flight showed significant progress from its first test flight in April 2023, when several of the main engines failed during takeoff and more failed during climb. The force of the missile blew up its launch pad and sent debris flying down the Texas coast. This prompted a lawsuit from environmentalists, who are concerned about the rocket’s massive impact on the surrounding area.

For the second flight, SpaceX installed a water-flooding system on its pad, which mitigated the blast and made improvements to the rocket’s engines. The vehicle passed the stage separation, and the upper stage engines also fired. But as the booster began firing 13 of its engines to fly the rocket back to Earth, one engine failed, “quickly falling into an unplanned rapid disassembly” — the phrase SpaceX uses to describe the loss of a vehicle. The spacecraft was lost after a leak led to a fire and its onboard autonomous flight termination system destroyed the vehicle.

This is a developing story that will be updated.