SpaceX achieves milestone with successful starship test flight
The gigantic Starship rocket from SpaceX successfully carried out a test flight on Thursday. It was the fourth launch attempt and the first successful one.
The rocket launched on Thursday from SpaceX's Boca Chica, Texas space base.
Starship is a two-stage heavy-lift rocket. The first stage is the Super Heavy booster, and the second is the Starship, which is a spaceship. A few minutes after the launch, the booster separated and, after igniting its engines, fell into the Indian Ocean as planned. This mission is a success, allowing the booster to be reused in the future.
"Despite loss of many tiles and a damaged flap, Starship made it all the way to a soft landing in the ocean!" - Elon Musk, SpaceX owner, wrote on platform X. He also congratulated the team responsible for the project.
Three failed attempts
The fourth attempt to launch the Starship heavy-lift rocket was not the company's first attempt at this task. During the first attempt, which took place in April 2023, the spaceship exploded in mid-air during its first full test flight to low Earth orbit. The explosion occurred around 4 minutes after takeoff when the spaceship failed to detach from the Super Heavy rocket.
The next failed attempt occurred in November of that same year. This time, the upper stage of the vehicle separated from the first stage of the Super Heavy rocket, which carried it 90 kilometres above the Earth's surface, but the first stage of the rocket exploded after separation.
The third attempt, conducted in mid-March 2024, ended with the destruction of the Starship during re-entry from space into the atmosphere. Despite this, the company's engineers gathered valuable data during the flight.
Elon Musk, billionaire and owner of SpaceX, hopes that thanks to the Starship project, humans will become an interplanetary species living on planets like Mars. NASA, the American space agency, also shares this vision. It plans to use Starship to send its astronauts to the Moon as part of the Artemis 3 mission, scheduled for 2026.
The Starship rocket is the largest and most powerful in the world - it measures 122 meters in length.
