SpaceX’s Starship makes its debut in orbit
It was meant to orbit for 10 hours, but the flight was cut short for safety reasons.
• less than 3 min read
Like a middle schooler at the gas station, Starship just hit orbit for the first time. A couple of years before it could be used as a NASA lunar lander, SpaceX’s biggest rocket reached this milestone yesterday, surpassing the suborbital levels of its previous 13 flights.
Mission report:
- Starship launched from Texas and splashed down in flames north of Hawaii three hours later.
- It was meant to orbit for 10 hours, but the flight was cut short for safety reasons. (CEO Elon Musk recently said that SpaceX is being careful to avoid the craft breaking apart over land, which would “diminish” his company’s popularity.)
- Still, Starship successfully deployed the 26 Starlink satellites it was carrying, marking the first time the 407-foot craft delivered Musk’s revenue-generating internet providers to space for operation.
Zoom out: SpaceX has invested $15+ billion into Starship, which the company is relying on to achieve its ambitious goal of 1 million satellites in orbit (it currently has 11,000). The megarocket is also set to take part in a NASA docking exercise next summer that precedes the space agency’s Artemis IV, a moon mission that will either tap Starship or Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin for its astronaut-carrying lunar lander, no earlier than 2028.—ML
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