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SpaceX, Elon Musk’s spaceflight company, launched its Starship rocket from the coast of South Texas on Saturday, a mammoth vehicle that could alter the future of space transportation and help NASA return astronauts to the moon.<\/p>\n
Saturday\u2019s flight of Starship, a powerful vehicle designed to carry NASA astronauts to the moon, was not a complete success. SpaceX did not achieve the test launch\u2019s ultimate objective \u2014 a partial trip around the world ending in a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.<\/p>\n
But the test flight, the vehicle\u2019s second, did show that the company had fixed key issues that arose during the earlier test operation in April. All 33 engines in the vehicle\u2019s lower booster stage fired, and the rocket made it through stage separation \u2014 when the booster falls away and the six engines of the upper stage light up to carry the vehicle to space.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cJust beautiful,\u201d John Insprucker, a SpaceX engineer and live launch commentator, said on the SpaceX webcast.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
By contrast, the first Starship launch badly damaged the launch site; several engines on the booster failed, fires knocked out the steering of the rocket and the flight termination system took too long to explode.<\/p>\n
According to SpaceX\u2019s \u201cfail fast, learn faster\u201d approach toward rocket design, successfully avoiding a repeat of past failures counts as major progress.<\/p>\n
However, the second flight revealed new challenges that Mr. Musk\u2019s engineers must overcome.<\/p>\n
Soon after stage separation, the booster exploded \u2014 a \u201crapid unscheduled disassembly,\u201d in the jargon of rocket engineers. The upper-stage Starship spacecraft continued heading toward orbit for several more minutes, reaching an altitude of more than 90 miles, but then SpaceX lost contact with it after the flight termination system detonated.<\/p>\n
In a statement, the Federal Aviation Administration said no injuries or property damage had been reported. It will conduct a mishap investigation, which is standard any time something goes wrong with a commercial rocket.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Engineers will now have to decipher what went wrong on both the booster and the upper-stage spacecraft, make fixes and then try again.<\/p>\n
Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever to fly. SpaceX aims to make both parts of the vehicle fully and rapidly reusable. That gives it the potential to launch bigger and heavier payloads to space and to significantly drive down the cost of lofting satellites, space telescopes, people and the things they need to live into space.<\/p>\n
The test journey\u2019s outcome was the latest split-screen moment in the career of Mr. Musk, a serial entrepreneur who previously transformed electronic payments with PayPal and electric cars with Tesla. As SpaceX prepared for the flight on Friday, Disney and Apple paused their ad spending with another one of his companies, the social network X, formerly known as Twitter, after Mr. Musk\u2019s endorsement of an antisemitic post on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Many outside observers are optimistic that SpaceX will get Starship to work fully.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cThey have fixed issues identified in their first flight and got further than ever before with this type of vehicle,\u201d said Phil Larson, who served as a White House space adviser during President Barack Obama\u2019s administration and later worked on communication efforts at SpaceX. \u201cThe magic of engineering is that it is all about learning, iterating the design, and reflying again soon.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Daniel L. Dumbacher, the executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, agreed. \u201cThis is a large launch system,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s going to take some work to get it to where it needs to go. I have no doubt that the SpaceX team will be able to figure out how to get the launch vehicle working.\u201d<\/p>\n
A couple of hours before sunrise on Saturday, liquid oxygen and liquid methane started flowing into the Starship. There was some fog near the ground but the skies above were clear, save for a few wisps of cirrus clouds.<\/p>\n
The countdown proceeded smoothly, stopping at a planned hold with 40 seconds left on the countdown clock. Then the hold was lifted, the final seconds ticked away and, shortly after 7 a.m. Central time, the 400-foot-tall rocket slowly rose into the sky. A new water deluge system appears to have protected the launchpad, avoiding the cloud of dust and debris that rose up in April.<\/p>\n
A few seconds later, the percussive roar buffeted spectators watching on South Padre Island, about five miles north of the launch site.<\/p>\n
At 2 minutes, 48 seconds after liftoff, there was a flash as Starship successfully performed what had been expected to be the trickiest part of the flight \u2014 \u201chot staging,\u201d when the six engines of the upper stage ignited before the booster dropped away. Loud cheers resonated from the SpaceX webcast, which was streaming from the company\u2019s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Half a minute later, there was a bigger flash when the booster \u2014 which was to splash in the Gulf of Mexico and sink \u2014 exploded. The upper stage continued onward unscathed. But then a few minutes later, the webcast fell into an uncomfortable silence when contact was lost with the Starship vehicle.<\/p>\n
Many of the thousands of people who woke up early to take in the launch on South Padre Island said they had enjoyed the spectacle. By 4:30 a.m., a long line of cars were waiting in darkness to enter Isla Blanca Park at the south end of the South Padre. Others walked from their hotels to avoid the traffic. Boats packed with watchers floated just to the south, outside of the exclusion zone to the east.<\/p>\n
The launch was experienced not just by those watching along the coast, but also those farther afield.<\/p>\n
Emma Guevara, a resident of Brownsville, the city in South Texas that is west of the SpaceX launch site, said the event had made her house shake.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cIt was way earlier than we all expected, so it woke everyone up,\u201d said Ms. Guevara, who is a Sierra Club organizer and has protested operations at the company\u2019s base.<\/p>\n
Top NASA officials offered congratulations to SpaceX.<\/p>\n