SpaceX launches biggest, most beefed-up Starship yet
SpaceX has launched a test flight of its biggest, most powerful Starship ever, an upgraded version that NASA relies on to land astronauts on the moon.
The redesigned mega-rocket made its debut two days after SpaceX chief Elon Musk announced he would take the company public.
The plane, launched from the southern tip of Texas, carried 20 fake Starlink satellites to be sent to the other side of the world.
This is the 12th test flight of the rocket Musk is building to one day take humans to Mars. But first comes the moon and NASA’s Artemis program.
The last of the older space-faring Starships took off in October. SpaceX’s third-generation Starship (a souped-up version called V3) soared from its brand new launch pad at Starbase near the Mexican border on Friday afternoon local time.
Last minute pad problems prevented the launch attempt on Thursday evening.
SpaceX was hoping to avoid the fireworks it experienced during back-to-back launches in 2025, when mid-air explosions rained debris into the Atlantic. Previous flights had also ended in flames.
With a length of 124 meters, the newest model outperforms the older Starship lines by more than a meter and has more engine thrust.
The revamped booster has fewer but larger and stronger grid fins to guide it back to earth after liftoff, and a larger and more robust fuel transfer line to feed the 33 main engines.
The retro-looking, stainless steel spacecraft also has more of everything (more cameras, more navigation and computing power), as well as docking cones for future rendezvous and lunar missions.
Starship is designed to be fully reusable, with giant mechanical arms on launch pads to catch returning rocket stages. But in this last test run nothing could be saved.
The Gulf of Mexico marked the end of the road for the redesigned first stage booster, and the Indian Ocean marked the end of the road for spacecraft and satellite demos.
NASA is paying billions of dollars to SpaceX, as well as Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, to provide lunar landers that will be used to land Artemis astronauts on the moon.
Two companies are competing to be first.
While Starship has reached the limits of space in multiple flights lasting an hour or so at most, Bezos’s Blue Moon has yet to take off, though a prototype is being prepared for a moonshot in late 2026.
NASA is following the successful flight around the Moon by four astronauts in April with an attempt to place it in orbit around the Earth, planned for 2027.
For this Artemis III mission, astronauts will practice docking Orion capsules into Starship, Blue Moon, or both.
Landing of two astronauts (Artemis IV) on the moon could be accomplished in 2028 using Starship or Blue Moon (whichever is safer and ready earlier).
This will be NASA’s first crewed Moon landing since Apollo 17 in 1972. This time the target is a lunar base near the south pole of the moon, where robots as well as astronauts work.
SpaceX has already started taking reservations for special flights to the Moon and Mars with Starship, although the timing is uncertain.
