During the flight, most-although apparently not all-of Super Heavy’s 33 engines fired successfully for several minutes. Starship and Super Heavy have each flown before, but today’s flight marked the first time they launched as a unit. Both components are designed to be reusable, and SpaceX aspires to eventually top off Starship’s fuel tanks in orbit to power even more adventurous itineraries. The launch system is composed of the 164-foot-tall, missile-shaped Starship vehicle and the 226-foot-tall Super Heavy booster it sits upon. Starship sits at the heart of SpaceX’s dreams of sending humans to the moon and Mars and is also designed to ferry countless tourists-and thousands of the company’s Starlink Internet satellites-into orbit.

“There are lots of different ways to succeed and fail with these kinds of tests,” says Teasel Muir-Harmony, a historian of science at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

That’s because the history of spaceflight is riddled with programs that have learned from explosive mistakes during test flights to reach their goals. “Starship gave us a rather spectacular end to what was truly an incredible test,” said John Insprucker, a SpaceX engineer who provided commentary during a livestream of the launch.ĭespite the abrupt ending, neither the company nor industry observers see the flight as a failure. For a few moments, Starship-and its goal of revolutionizing space access-appeared to be soaring smoothly, but the harsh reality of rocketry soon kicked in, and an anomaly caused the massive launch vehicle to disintegrate in a fireball. local time at the southernmost tip of Texas, SpaceX’s Starship launch system-the largest, most powerful rocket yet built-roared to life in a milestone liftoff that sent it rising above the Gulf of Mexico. The skies over Texas have never seen a fireball quite like this before.

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