SpaceX launches Starship rocket into space

SpaceX has successfully launched its Starship rocket for the first time. During the second official test flight, the company launched the largest rocket in history into space. The Super Heavy booster blew up before it could land again.

The Starship rocket lifted off from SpaceX’s own launch site in Texas at 2:03 PM Dutch time. The rocket consists of a first stage, the Super Heavy, and a second stage, the Starship spacecraft. The Super Heavy booster ignited its 33 Raptor engines, all of which continued to operate during the first minutes after launch. With this, SpaceX solved its biggest problem since the previous launch. The company launched its first Starship rocket in April, but it fell apart shortly after launch. That was because quite a few of the Raptor engines stopped working at that time; that didn’t seem to be the case now.

The Starship spacecraft’s six Raptor engines also successfully ignited after the second stage disconnected. After about nine minutes, Starship was carried further into space, but the rocket will not complete a full orbit around the Earth.

The only part of the launch that was less successful was the landing of the Super Heavy booster. It should have landed back on Earth, but it didn’t. The booster appears to have exploded sometime shortly after disconnection. This was done by the automatic flight termination system, but it is not clear why that happened. SpaceX did not say anything about this on the webcast.

Starship is the future rocket of SpaceX, which wants to use the spacecraft to, among other things, take astronauts to the moon and in the future Mars. The company has been working on the rocket for years and conducted the first and so far only official test flight there in April, but the rocket failed to reach space. Now that Starship has succeeded, it is the largest rocket to ever reach space. With a height of 121 meters, the rocket is about ten meters higher than the Saturn rocket with which astronauts flew to the moon during the Apollo program.