SpaceX closed a troubled but instructive chapter in its Starship rocket program Monday with a near-perfect test flight that carried the stainless steel spacecraft halfway around the world from South Texas to the Indian Ocean.
The rocket's 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines roared to life at 6:23 pm CDT (7:23 pm EDT; 23:23 UTC), throttling up to generate some 16.7 million pounds of thrust, by large measure more powerful than any rocket before Starship. Moments later, the 404-foot-tall (123.1-meter) rocket began a vertical climb away from SpaceX's test site in Starbase, Texas, near the US-Mexico border.
From then on, the rocket executed its flight plan like clockwork. This was arguably SpaceX's most successful Starship test flight to date. The only flight with a similar claim occurred one year ago Monday, when the company caught the rocket's Super Heavy booster back at the launch pad after soaring to the uppermost fringes of the atmosphere. But that flight didn't accomplish as much in space.
"Starship's eleventh flight test reached every objective, providing valuable data as we prepare the next generation of Starship and Super Heavy," SpaceX posted on X.
SpaceX's 11th Starship flight climbs away from Starbase, Texas.
SpaceX didn't try to recover the Super Heavy booster on this flight, but the goals the company set before the launch included an attempt to guide the enormous rocket stage to a precise splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of South Texas. The booster, reused from a previous flight in March, also validated a new engine configuration for its landing burn, first reigniting 13 of its engines, then downshifting to five, then to three for the final hover.
That all worked, along with pretty much everything else apart from an indication on SpaceX's livestream that Starship's Super Heavy booster stage lost an engine early in its descent. The malfunctioning engine had no impact on the rest of the flight.