SpaceX’s Starship launch: Megarocket lifts off on 10th test flight after multiple delays

SpaceX’s Starship megarocket lifted off Tuesday (local time) on its 10th test flight, marking progress after a series of explosive failures that had raised doubts about Elon Musk’s goal of colonizing Mars.

The 403-foot (123-meter) rocket, the most powerful ever built, launched from Starbase in southern Texas at 6:30 pm local time, drawing cheers from SpaceX engineers, according to a live webcast.

Starship is central to Musk’s vision of making humanity a multiplanetary species, while NASA plans to use a modified version to land astronauts on the Moon.

The launch followed two scrubs: a fuel leak on Sunday and bad weather on Monday. The pressure was high, with the last three test flights ending in upper-stage explosions — twice over the Caribbean and once in space. In June, another upper stage blew up during ground testing.

“We’ve had so many tests and it hasn’t proven itself reliable,” Dallas Kasaboski, a space analyst at Analysys Mason, told AFP. “The successes have not exceeded the failures.”

For this mission, the upper stage was designed to fly halfway around the world before splashing down near northwestern Australia. It carried dummy Starlink satellites and prototype heat-shield tiles, flying a path meant to stress-test its rear flaps.

The booster, Super Heavy, landed in the Gulf of Mexico. Unlike earlier attempts to catch it with the launch tower’s “chopstick arms,” SpaceX focused this time on gathering data about engine cutoffs.

Despite the setbacks, analysts say Starship is not in crisis. SpaceX’s “fail fast, learn fast” approach has already made it a leader with its Falcon rockets, Dragon capsules, and Starlink satellites.

Still, challenges remain. Musk has called developing a reusable orbital heat shield the toughest task. “What we’re trying to achieve here with Starship is to have a heat shield that can be flown immediately,” he said on a webcast Monday.

Another key hurdle is proving Starship can be refueled in orbit with super-cooled propellant, a critical but untested step for deep-space missions.

The clock is ticking: NASA needs a lunar lander version ready by 2027, and Musk has vowed to send an uncrewed Starship to Mars next year.