SpaceX launches the 11th test flight of its mega Starship rocket with another win

SpaceX launched another of its mammoth Starship rockets on a test flight Monday, efficiently making it midway around the world while releasing mock satellites like last time.

Starship — the greatest and most highly effective rocket ever constructed — thundered into the night sky from the southern tip of Texas. The booster peeled away and made a managed entry into the Gulf of Mexico as deliberate, with the spacecraft skimming space before descending into the Indian Ocean. Nothing was recovered.

“Hey, welcome back to Earth, Starship,” SpaceX’s Dan Huot announced as staff cheered. “What a day.”

It was the 11th test flight for a full-scale Starship, which SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk intends to use to ship people to Mars. NASA’s need is more speedy. The space company can’t land astronauts on the moon by decade’s end without the 403-foot (123-meter) Starship, the reusable vehicle meant to get them from lunar orbit down to the floor and back up.

Instead of remaining inside Launch Control as traditional, Musk said that for the first time he was going exterior to watch — “much more visceral.”

The earlier test flight in August — a success after a string of explosive failures — adopted a comparable path with comparable objectives. More maneuvering was constructed in this time, particularly for the spacecraft. SpaceX carried out a sequence of exams during the spacecraft’s entry over the Indian Ocean as observe for future landings back at the launch website.

Like before, Starship carried up eight mock satellites mimicking SpaceX’s Starlinks. The whole flight lasted just over an hour, originating from Starbase close to the Mexican border.

NASA’s appearing administrator Sean Duffy praised Starship’s progress. “Another major step toward landing Americans on the moon’s south pole,” he said via X.

SpaceX is modifying its Cape Canaveral launch websites to accommodate Starships, in addition to the a lot smaller Falcon rockets used to transport astronauts and provides to the International Space Station for NASA.

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