Starship test flight nearly completed

SPACEX’S Starship rocket, designed to eventually send astronauts to the moon and beyond, completed nearly an entire test flight on its third try yesterday, making it much farther than before with a cruise through low orbit before being destroyed during a return to Earth, the company said.

During a live webcast of the flight, SpaceX commentators said mission control lost communications with the spacecraft during its atmospheric re-entry.

The vehicle was nearing a planned splashdown in the Indian Ocean about an hour after launch.

A few minutes later, SpaceX confirmed that the spacecraft had been lost, presumably either burning up or coming apart during re-entry or crashing into the sea.

Still, completion of most of the intended hour-plus test flight trajectory of Starship marked a major milestone in the development of a spacecraft crucial to Elon Musk’s satellite launch business and Nasa’s moon programme.

Nasa chief Bill Nelson congratulated SpaceX on what he called “a successful test flight” in a statement posted on the social media platform X.

The two-stage spacecraft, consisting of the Starship cruise vessel mounted atop its towering Super Heavy rocket booster, blasted off from the Muskowned company’s Starbase launch site near Boca Chica Village on the south Texas Gulf Coast. During its flight, Starship reached peak altitudes of 234km, the company said.

SpaceX engineers had hoped to improve on the Starship’s two past performances, which both ended in explosions minutes after launch. However, the company had acknowledged in advance a high probability that its latest flight might similarly end with the spacecraft’s destruction before the planned mission profile was finished.

SpaceX’s engineering culture, considered more risk-tolerant than many of the aerospace industry’s more established players, is built on a flight-testing strategy that pushes spacecraft to the point of failure, then fine-tunes improvements through frequent repetition.

All indications are that Starship remains a considerable distance from becoming fully operational.