The billionaire Elon Musk’s Starship mega-rocket, developed to reach the Moon and Mars, successfully completed a test flight on Tuesday, after a series of previous attempts marked by explosions that raised doubts about its progress.
Standing over 120 meters tall, the behemoth took off in the evening from Texas, amidst the engineers’ enthusiastic applause, after Sunday and Monday flights were canceled due to a technical issue and then unfavorable weather conditions, as reported by AFP.
This tenth test flight of the largest rocket ever built followed three earlier attempts this year when explosions occurred in the air.
This series of failures, coupled with another explosion during a ground test in June, fueled doubts about Starship's progress, while Elon Musk continues to aim for the first launches to Mars starting in 2026.
All these concerns should have been dispelled by this new test flight, with the company of the world's richest man successfully achieving the goals it set for itself this time.
"Great job by the SpaceX team," Elon Musk hailed his company's success on his social network X.
Landing with a few missing plates
After the mega-rocket launched, its two stages - the Super Heavy booster and the Starship spacecraft, which gives the entire vehicle its name - separated. The first component, which SpaceX demonstrated it could recover with mechanical arms in a spectacular maneuver, this time landed in the Gulf of Mexico, according to the flight plan aimed at collecting new data.
As for the massive spacecraft, which had exploded in the last three test flights, it managed to reach space and successfully deploy the satellite simulators it was carrying, a first.
Then, it successfully re-entered the Earth's atmosphere without exploding and landed, as planned, in the Indian Ocean, although it lost some of its protective plates along the way and suffered some material damage, according to the company's live video transmission.
"We removed several plates from critical areas of the vehicle," stated Dan Huot, a SpaceX official, during the live broadcast. "We are really trying to stress it to identify its weak points," he explained.