By Joey Roulette and Steve Nesius
STARBASE, Texas, Sept 28 (Reuters) – SpaceX’s next-generation Starship rocket reached orbit for the first time on Monday despite having one of its engines shut down unexpectedly, overcoming a hitch mid-flight to deploy its first batch of new Starlink satellites in a truncated mission ending hours earlier than originally planned.
The uncrewed 40-story-tall vehicle, consisting of a Super Heavy booster rocket topped by the main upper-stage Starship vessel, thundered off its launch pad from SpaceX’s Starbase complex along the Gulf of Mexico near Brownsville.
The mission was scheduled to last 10 hours, but was reduced to three hours because of the engine problem. It was Starship’s 14th flight since 2023, as Elon Musk’s company plans to put the vehicle into routine use starting later this year.
SpaceX shares, which were up nearly 9% from the IPO price, were down about 1% on Monday.
The Super Heavy booster lofted the Starship upper stage into space before returning itself to Gulf waters for an engine-controlled splashdown, following hard landings for the booster on two previous missions. Some engines on that booster stopped working during its descent, SpaceX said.
Upon reaching space, one of Starship’s three main engines shut down prematurely, a development that led SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot to announce on the company’s live stream of the mission that the craft would be unable to reach orbit.
“The team has made the call not to commit to orbit,” Huot said.
But Huot reversed course minutes later after an update from engineers confirmed that the craft could still attempt an engine firing that would boost it into orbit, which Starship successfully did minutes later.
Once in orbit, Starship deployed 26 next-generation Starlink satellites one by one at an altitude of roughly 269 km (161 miles).
“All 26 Starlink V3 operational satellites deployed and operating nominally,” Musk wrote on X.
Starship was built to launch SpaceX’s Starlink satellites more frequently and carry future NASA missions to the moon. Reaching orbit, a primary benchmark for any new rocket designed to deliver payloads to space, was a long-delayed feat for Starship, which Musk once predicted would be achieved in 2022, to be followed by satellite deployments in 2023.
All 13 of Starship’s previous test flights since 2023 were limited to suborbital space, despite a nearly decade-long development campaign that has cost SpaceX more than $15 billion to date. Musk has said he envisions ultimately flying hundreds or thousands of Starship missions a year, a launch pace unprecedented in the space industry.
“Starship is 2 to 3 years away from hourly flights,” Musk wrote on X on Sunday.
Starship had been due to complete six Earth orbits on Monday before the mission was shortened. The engine issue on Monday made even more critical the mission objective of a successful deorbit, requiring a firing of one Raptor engine while in space to precisely angle the vehicle for atmospheric re-entry. The ship has three main Raptor engines.
The spacecraft’s final controlled descent is designed to culminate with a thruster maneuver to flip the vehicle vertically so that it hits the sea in a nose-up position. While future missions call for Starship to execute a similar touchdown on land back in Texas, no recovery of the spacecraft is planned for its latest flight, contrary to Musk’s previous hopes.
TEST MISSION WITH REAL PAYLOAD
Monday’s voyage counts as the 14th test flight of Starship. But it nonetheless was carrying the group of new Starlink internet satellites, the first orbital payload for Starship.
Analysts estimate Monday’s launch of SpaceX’s new V3 Starlink satellites equals hundreds of millions of dollars in projected revenue for the company’s Starlink unit, based on the network’s added customer capacity — underscoring Starship’s fundamental role in serving the company’s profit nucleus.
According to SpaceX, the V3 Starlink satellites on Monday’s mission can handle 10 times more data than their predecessor V2 mini-sats that the company has been launching 20 or 30 at a time on its workhorse Falcon 9 rockets.
Seeking to build out his broadband satellite constellation at a faster pace, Musk wants to launch the higher-capacity V3s in batches of 60 per launch once Starship goes into routine operation.
Starship’s planned orbital debut also comes three months after SpaceX went public with a record-shattering IPO in June that made it the sixth-biggest US company by value and turned Musk, who founded the company in 2002, into the world’s first trillionaire.
Much of SpaceX’s market worth and continued investor confidence in the company — valued at $2 trillion as of Friday’s close — rides on the success of Starship, which was designed as the world’s first fully reusable spacecraft.
Starship is also set to play a pivotal role in NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the moon’s surface for the first time since 1972 and build a long-term lunar presence as a stepping stone to eventual human exploration of Mars.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Christian Plumb and Will Dunham)
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