BOCA CHICA, Texas – In a historic achievement for commercial spaceflight, SpaceX’s Starship launch vehicle lifted off from the company’s South Texas facility on Thursday and completed its first-ever orbit of the Earth.
The towering, fully reusable rocket blasted off at 8:12 a.m. local time, its 33 Raptor engines roaring to life and generating a combined 16 million pounds of thrust as it climbed into the morning skies over the Gulf of Mexico.
After reaching space, the 395-foot-tall Starship separated from its massive Super Heavy booster stage. The booster then executed a successful powered vertical landing back at the Boca Chica launch site, while the Starship spacecraft continued on, firing its own Raptor vacuum engines to accelerate onto an orbital trajectory.
Over the next 90 minutes, Starship coasted between an initial elliptical orbit ranging from 150 miles to over 190 miles altitude. This allowed SpaceX to test critical re-entry maneuvers at planetary scale for the first time with a vehicle of Starship’s immense size.
As it passed over the Indian Ocean on its lone orbit, Starship performed a simulated landing burn with its engines, adjusting its angle to mimic terminal phase re-entry. It then executed another critical burn to elevate one tip of the lifting body back into the atmosphere at extreme re-entry speeds.
Starship finally descended feet-first under aerodynamic control over the Pacific Ocean, safely softlanding in the waters off the Hawaiian island of Kauai around two hours after liftoff. Recovery crews were enroute to retrieve and transport the flight-proven vehicle.
“With a test like this, crazy enough things were going to happen, but this was a seriously battle-hardened Starship,” said an exuberant Elon Musk in a post-launch briefing. “We’re going to smash a lot of brackets with this one.”
The inaugural orbital test sets the stage for SpaceX to combine Starship with NASA’s Space Launch System for the first crewed Artemis moon landing in the next couple years. But Musk also reinforced his goal to eventually use Starship to establish permanent outposts on the Moon and Mars.
“The philosophers have finally been defeated!” Musk exclaimed. “We are now a multi-planetary species.”
