Elon Musk’s mega rocket Starship, which the tech billionaire hopes will one day carry humans to Mars, has completed its first successful test flight, following a year of – at times explosive – mishaps.
The SpaceX ship blasted off from the Starbase launch site in South Texas just after 6:30 p.m. before deploying a test payload of eight dummy satellites into space. It then coasted through space for around an hour before coming down as planned in the Indian Ocean.
No crew members were aboard the demo launch.
Tuesday’s blast off was the tenth test for the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket which SpaceX and NASA hope to use to get astronauts back on the moon later this decade.
Ahead of the launch, Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Washington-based think tank the American Enterprise Institute described the stakes of the mission as “the highest they’ve ever been for a Starship launch.”
Starship’s success also came after a year of failures, with back-to-back tests in January and March ending after just minutes with fiery wreckage raining into the ocean. The ninth and most recent test in May also ended when the spacecraft tumbled out of control and broke apart.
The first Starship exploded minutes into its inaugural test flight in 2023.
The 400-foot-tall vehicle consists of an upper-stage spacecraft, the Starship, and a powerful booster stage, with 33 engines, known as the Super Heavy.
SpaceX later redesigned the Super Heavy booster with larger and stronger fins for greater stability, according to a company post on the social platform X this month.
During Tuesday’s launch, the booster also returned successfully, splashing down in the Atlantic after testing a landing-burn engine sequence.
Starship itself orbited the Earth — passing from daylight in Texas through night and back into daytime again — ahead of the planned splashdown. Before the craft hit the waves, its engines fired, flipping its position so it entered the water upright with the nose cone pointed upward.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
