‘Starship is in orbit’: cheers go up as huge SpaceX rocket circles Earth for first time

Mission goes ahead despite some fears an initial engine failure after the Texas launch would scupper the attemptSpaceX has sent its enormous Starship rocket into Earth’s orbit for the first time on a milestone flight intended to pave the way for future missions to the moon and Mars.The rocket, the largest and most powerful ever built, blasted off from SpaceX’s Starbase launch facility in Texas at 7.48am local time (1.48pm BST), marking its 14th test flight and first attempt to circle the planet before falling back to Earth. Elon Musk’s Starship megarocket reached orbit for the first time on Monday after blasting off from Texas, in a major milestone for SpaceX’s future plans, including trips to the Moon and Mars. The black-and-silver behemoth, standing more than 120 meters (131 yards) tall, rose through a thick cloud of smoke on an ambitious 14th test flight.

The upper stage separated from the Super Heavy booster and reached orbit about 26 minutes into flight. During the test, expected to last about 10 hours, the experimental rocket’s upper stage is set to orbit Earth several times and deploy 26 next-generation Starlink satellites. As a precaution, the spacecraft was launched on a suborbital trajectory and — after some back-and-forth — the launch team decided to perform a second burn to reach orbit.

“Starship is orbital,” announced one member of the launch team, as cheers rang out. Satellite deployment began minutes later. Previous Starship tests, all conducted on safer, less demanding suborbital trajectories, had ended in spectacular explosions, including over the Caribbean.

28 000 km/h The latest test flight, coming three months after SpaceX’s high-profile stock market debut, aims to accelerate development of the largest and most powerful rocket ever designed. After several years of development and testing in Texas, SpaceX began flying Starship in its full configuration in 2023 and has since made numerous modifications through the successes and failures of successive tests. But enormous technical challenges remain before Starship, which Musk wants to make fully reusable, can conduct commercial flights, deploy data centers in orbit or reach the Moon or the Red Planet.

With this new test, SpaceX hopes to usher in an “exciting new phase” of development that will include, among other things, tests of refueling the rocket in orbit. The second burn to reach orbit is “the hardest part,” requiring “more forces and more complex calculations,” explained Kathleen Curlee, a senior analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, before the launch. To reach the necessary altitude and speed, “the rocket has to do different things when it’s experiencing different levels of gravity,” she told AFP.

On this flight, SpaceX is aiming for a circular orbit about 275 km (171 miles) above the Earth, requiring a speed of about 28,000 km/hour.