SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas—Elon Musk’s fervent wish before the Starship’s orbital debut was that if the launch was not successful—a highly likely scenario, given that the 33-engine Super Heavy first-stage booster had never flown before—at least the launchpad be spared.
“It’s a very risky flight,” Musk, the founder, CEO and chief engineer at SpaceX, said during a question-and-answer session on Twitter ahead of the first launch attempt. “It would take us probably several months to rebuild the launchpad if we melt it.”
At 9:33 a.m. EDT on April 20, Musk got his wish. On its second launch attempt, the 394-ft.-tall, 30-ft.-dia. vehicle cleared the launchpad at SpaceX’s privately owned spaceport in Boca Chica Beach, located just south of here on the Texas coast.
- Super Heavy is the most powerful rocket ever flown
- Massive booster’s mission is to shrink costs
- SpaceX is focused on rapid upgrades
Climbing through partly cloudy skies, the vehicle headed east over the Gulf of Mexico with a ground-shaking roar from the Super Heavy’s methane-fueled Raptor engines. Combined, the 33 engines can generate more than 16.7 million lb. of force at liftoff—twice the power of NASA’s Space Launch System Moon rocket, which debuted in November for the Artemis I mission. However, not all the Super Heavy’s engines were firing as the booster began its ascent.
The Starship and Super Heavy passed through the region of maximum aerodynamic pressure but ran into an issue as the booster was flipping itself to prepare to separate from the upper stage about 3 min. after liftoff.
The vehicle, which reached an altitude of about 24 mi., appeared to be in a slow tumble before exploding. SpaceX did not immediately confirm if the vehicle was destroyed by its automated flight-termination system. “That’s what we call a rapid unscheduled disassembly,” SpaceX launch commentator John Insprucker said.
Musk was quick to compliment the SpaceX team on its effort. “Congrats on an exciting test launch of Starship,” Musk wrote on Twitter. “Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months.”
The first launch campaign on April 17 ended when engineers discovered a problem with a valve used to help pressurize a Super Heavy propellant tank.
Three days later, the booster and the Starship upper stage were refilled with more than 10 million lb. of liquid methane and liquid oxygen, and at 8:33 a.m. local time, the most power-ful rocket ever developed lifted off.
SpaceX had hoped the Super Heavy’s 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines would burn for 2 min. 49 sec. and separate, leaving the Starship upper stage, outfitted with six Raptor engines, on track to reach near--orbital velocity and an altitude up to 146 mi. above Earth.
For its debut launch, SpaceX did not plan to attempt to recover the Super Heavy booster, but future versions are to be designed to return for reuse, similar to SpaceX’s current fleet of Falcon 9 boosters. For the flight test, after separating from the Starship, the booster was to flip around, reignite engines and make a soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico about 20 mi. off the coast of Boca Chica.
Meanwhile, the Starship was to coast around the planet, then splash down into the Pacific Ocean about 140 mi. off the coast of Oahu, Hawaii, 90 min. after launch.
The Starship/Super Heavy is intended to become a fully reusable, multipurpose transportation system capable of putting 100-150 tons into orbit. “When you have a high flight rate and full and rapid reusability, even a rocket the size of the Starship might be $1 million or a few million dollars per flight,” Musk said.
Among the Starship’s customers is NASA, which in 2021 awarded SpaceX a multibillion-dollar contract to use a Starship variant to shuttle astronauts to and from lunar orbit and the surface of the Moon.
The U.S. Space Force also is keeping a close eye on the Starship and other superheavy lifters. “We track Starship very closely,” Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, program executive officer for Assured Access to Space, said at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs on April 18.
These systems are designed to provide “massive throw weight to [low Earth orbit (LEO)]—not to any other domain,” Purdy said. “Potentially, long-term, we move to kind of a massive freight train model of pushing all the customers into LEO.”
SpaceX launched a series of Star-ship second-stage prototypes for a total of nine suborbital, high-altitude and landing tests between July 2019 and May 2021, but it has never put the vehicle into space.
A reusable, Mars-class rocket—a personal and professional goal of Musk’s for decades—is the key to bringing down the cost of space transportation to the point where human civilization can migrate beyond Earth. “What actually matters here is the fact that we are building rockets at a rapid pace,” Musk said before launch.
“We have Booster 9 and Ship 26 almost ready to go and a steady cadence of rocket production afterward with significant improvements between each iteration,” he added. “The payload for this mission is information—information that allows us to improve the design of future Starship builds. That is our only goal.”
The FAA, which oversees commercial spaceflight by U.S. companies, granted SpaceX a license to launch on April 14, culminating a multi-agency process that took more than 500 days. “We’re hoping for a safe launch, but you never know where things might break or when things might go wrong,” an FAA official said before launch. “I think we have really good mitigations in place [to cover] all the potential hazards that could occur during launch.”
A safety zone extending about 4 mi. from SpaceX’s Starbase spaceport was established to keep non-essential personnel and launch viewers from the potential blast danger zone. Under its FAA license, SpaceX was required to obtain an insurance policy covering at least $500 million for possible third-party property damage caused by a launch accident and $48 million for any third-party damage during prelaunch preparations.
—With Garrett Reim in Colorado Springs
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