New York (AFP) – SpaceX’s Starship on Friday sailed through its first test flight since the company went public. “Starship is intact, floating in the ocean and transmitting telemetry!” company head Elon Musk said on X. The ship serenely splashed into the Indian Ocean to wild cheers from SpaceX employees, who were watching live footage from the company’s Starbase. “I’m losing my mind right now,” spokesperson Dan Huot said on the livestream. “This is the first time we’ve put an intact Starship in the water.”
“This is a dream scenario for the team that’s trying to get this heat shield data.” The flight aims were similar to those of a mostly successful voyage carried out in May, which debuted the latest edition of the powerful Starship, its third-generation model. The primary goals of this 13th test launch were to once again demonstrate those redesigns in flight, this time without any hiccups. The upper stage deployed 20 Starlink V3 satellites, a test SpaceX said “will provide critical data as we prepare to expand our Starlink constellation” of the company’s satellite internet service.
The approximately one-hour flight also tested upgrades to the mammoth ship’s heat shield. The company had said after its May test that it had made “several modifications to hardware and software to address issues seen on the previous flight.” The landing burn of the booster was still a bit harder than the company hoped. “Just looking at the booster real quick, it didn’t look like we lit all 13 engines that we were planning for that initial land and burn,” said Huot. “We were targeting a softer splash on it, and as you saw, it came in with quite a bit of velocity.”
A previous attempt at launch was abruptly scrubbed just as the booster began to ignite, in an automatic stoppage that occurred after some engines did not start. The launch was then further delayed over weather and visibility concerns. Friday’s flight was the first after Musk’s SpaceX went public on Wall Street in June, with a record initial public offering. The rocket company has rapidly expanded its satellite internet service and voiced lofty ambitions for AI data centers in space.
There’s a lot riding on SpaceX’s progress: the company is under contract with NASA to produce a modified version of Starship to serve as a lunar landing system. Sharing an image of the Starship rocket passing the Moon, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman commented that “pretty clear from this shot that SpaceX knows where we are going!” “When Starship comes online, its capabilities will be game-changing, not least of which will be ensuring we never give up the Moon again!”
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