SpaceX launched its biggest, most powerful Starship yet on a test flight Friday, an upgraded version that Nasa is counting on to land astronauts on the moon.
The redesigned mega-rocket made its debut two days after SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced he’s taking the company public. It blasted off from the southern tip of Texas, carrying 20 mock Starlink satellites for release halfway around the world.
It’s the 12th test flight of the rocket that Musk is building to get people to Mars one day. But first comes the moon and Nasa’s Artemis program.
The last of the old space-skimming Starships lifted off in October. SpaceX’s third-generation Starship – a souped-up version dubbed V3 – soared from a brand-new launchpad at Starbase, near the Mexican border. Last-minute pad issues thwarted Thursday evening’s launch attempt.
SpaceX was hoping to avoid the fireworks it experienced during back-to-back launches last year when midair explosions rained wreckage down on the Atlantic. Earlier flights also ended in flames.
At 407ft (124 meters), the latest model eclipses the older Starship lines by several feet and packs more engine thrust.
Starship is meant to be fully reusable, with giant mechanical arms at the launchpads to catch the returning rocket stages. But on this latest trial run, nothing was being recovered. The Gulf of Mexico marked the end of the road for the redesigned first-stage booster, and the Indian Ocean for the spacecraft and its satellite demos.
Nasa is paying SpaceX billions of dollars – and also Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin – to provide the lunar landers that will be used to land Artemis astronauts on the moon.
The two companies are scrambling to be first.
While Starship has reached the fringes of space on multiple flights lasting an hour at most, Bezos’s Blue Moon has yet to lift off, although a prototype is being readied for a moonshot later this year.
Nasa is following April’s successful lunar fly-around by four astronauts with a docking trial run in orbit around Earth planned for next year. For that Artemis III mission, astronauts will practice docking their Orion capsule with Starship, Blue Moon or both.
A moon landing by two astronauts – Artemis IV – could follow as soon as 2028 using either Starship or Blue Moon, whichever lander is safer and ready first. It will be Nasa’s first lunar landing with a crew since 1972’s Apollo 17. The goal this time is a moon base near the lunar south pole, staffed by astronauts as well as robots.
