SpaceX Notches Major Wins during tenth Starship test | Techcrunch

The huge Starship Rocket from SpaceX lifted on Tuesday evening on his tenth test flight, and hit two long -wanted milestones and put an end to a series of failures.

The 403-foot vehicle raised from Starbase, the launch facility of SpaceX and recently recorded City, at 7:30 pm et after two scrubs earlier in this week. The rocket climbed 33 methane-driven birds of prey engines before separating about three minutes after the launch.

When descending, the super heavy booster tested a new maneuver: deliberately closing the engines used for landing and transition to back -up engines. The test will help engineers understand how the booster could perform in the case of failure. The test seemed to go as planned, with the 232-foot long booster successfully made a targeted Splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.

In the meantime, the upper stage, also called Starship, reached space. There, for the first time on a spaceship flight, it opened his Payload door in Pez-Stijl and released eight Starlink Massa-Simular Satellites. This is a possibility that SpaceX had planned, but has not demonstrated about earlier missions. The company also successfully illuminated one of the Raptor engines in the room before the vehicle led to the Indian Ocean, where it was splashing, turned and immediately exploded.

On the way down, the outside of the ship was exposed to incredible heat during atmospheric return, making an excellent test environment for the improved thermal protection system. SpaceX also used this test to try out a series of experiments, such as removing tiles from parts of the ship to see how the “skin” works on return, plus a new metal tile and an active cooled tile.

The most important thing, however, is that the upper phase has completed the entire test and was splashed in the Indian Ocean without losing comms with SpaceXing engineers. Durin The last flight reached the ship and then lost the posture check during the coastal phase, so that the doors of the load capacity do not open. Engineers seem to have overcome those problems.

It is a big win for SpaceX, which repeatedly lost the upper phase of the Starship because of a series of technical failures during the flight. The persistent issues have asked questions about whether the rocket is ready to land people on the moon against mid-2027 for NASA, or if it will be able to use the next generation of Starlink satellites for the company.

This test marks material progress for the Starship program, which the company ultimately wants to use to send people and freight to Mars. Although SpaceX still has to complete a series of difficult technical milestones before it can get there, it came a step closer tonight.