SpaceX launched the seventh test flight of its Starship rocket on Thursday, as Elon Musks’s company looks to push development of the mammoth vehicle further, including with a crucial test for how it will deploy satellites.
The company launched Starship from its private “Starbase” facility near Brownsville, Texas, shortly after 5:30 p.m. ET.
A few minutes later, the rocket’s “Super Heavy” booster returned to land at the launch site, in SpaceX’s second successful “catch” during a flight.
However, SpaceX lost communication with Starship, the upper stage of the rocket that continues on into space. The company’s webcast showed data stopped transmitting from Starship about nine minutes into the launch.
“We are assuming that the ship has been lost,” SpaceX communications manager Dan Huot said.
There are not any people on board the Starship flight. However, SpaceX is flying 10 “Starlink simulators” in the rocket’s payload bay and planned to attempt to deploy the satellite-like objects once in space. This is a key test of the rocket’s capabilities, as SpaceX needs Starship to deploy its much larger and heavier upcoming generation of Starlink satellites.
While SpaceX didn’t specify what the Starlink simulators are made of, mass simulators are commonly used in rocket vehicle development and are often simple constructions of metal or concrete that weigh roughly the same as the object in question. As the rocket is not reaching orbit, the simulators are expected to follow a similar trajectory to the rocket and are designed to burn up during reentry.
The launch plan called for Starship to reach space and then travel halfway around the Earth before reentering the atmosphere and splashing down in the Indian Ocean about an hour after liftoff.
The rocket’s booster returned after separating from Starship and landed on the arms of the company’s launch tower — a feat the company pulled off on the fifth flight but missed on the sixth.
As with each previous flight, SpaceX aims to push development further by assessing additional Starship capabilities, including tests of its heatshield tiles and the trajectory of its intense reentry.
Starship is critical to the company’s plans, even with its $350 billion valuation and already dominant position in the space industry.
Starship is both the tallest and most powerful rocket ever launched. Fully stacked on the Super Heavy booster, Starship stands 403 feet tall and is about 30 feet in diameter. SpaceX has flown the full Starship rocket system on six spaceflight tests so far since April 2023, at a steadily increasing cadence.
The Super Heavy booster, which stands 232 feet tall, is what begins the rocket’s journey to space. At its base are 33 Raptor engines, which together produce 16.7 million pounds of thrust — about double the 8.8 million pounds of thrust of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, which launched for the first time in 2022.
Starship itself, at 171 feet tall, has six Raptor engines — three for use while in the Earth’s atmosphere and three for operating in the vacuum of space.
The rocket is powered by liquid oxygen and liquid methane. The full system requires more than 10 million pounds of propellant for launch.
The Starship flying on this launch, tagged as Ship 33, also represents a second-generation version of the vehicle, called “Block 2.”
SpaceX noted that the “significant upgrades” to this vehicle include changes to the flaps on the vehicle’s nose, redesigns of its propulsion system to boost performance, an enhanced flight computer, 30 cameras placed along the vehicle for monitoring the rocket and a reinforced heat shield.
The Starship system is designed to be fully reusable and aims to become a new method of flying cargo and people beyond Earth. The rocket is also critical to NASA’s plan to return astronauts to the moon. SpaceX won a multibillion-dollar contract from the agency to use Starship as a crewed lunar lander as part of NASA’s Artemis moon program.
