SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket lifted off on its tenth test flight Tuesday evening, hitting two long sought milestones and putting an end to a string of failures.
The 403-foot vehicle lifted off from Starbase, SpaceX’s launch facility and recently incorporated city, at 7:30 pm ET after two scrubs earlier in this week. The rocket ascended on 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines before separating around three minutes after liftoff.
On descent, the Super Heavy booster tested out a new maneuver: intentionally shutting down the engines used for landing and transitioning to backup engines. The test will help engineers understand how the Booster might perform in the case of failure. The test appeared to go as planned, with the 232-foot-tall booster successfully making a targeted splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
Meanwhile, the upper stage, also called Starship, reached space. There, for the first time on a Starship flight, it opened its Pez-style payload door and released eight Starlink mass-simular satellites. This is a capability that SpaceX had planned, but failed to demonstrate on earlier missions. The company also successfully re-lit one of the Raptor engines in space before guiding the vehicle toward the Indian Ocean, where it splashed down, tipped over, and promptly exploded.
On the way down, the exterior of the Ship was exposed to incredible heat during atmospheric reentry, providing an excellent test environment for the upgraded thermal-protection system. SpaceX also used this test to try out a series of experiments, like removing tiles from sections of the Ship to see how its “skin” operates on reentr …