Steve Nesius | Reuters
The rocket’s Super Heavy booster detached from the Starship spacecraft about two minutes into the flight, and made a controlled splashdown in the Gulf. The company is seeking to make a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean with the Starship spacecraft, or upper stage.
Elon Musk’s aerospace and defense contractor designed Starship, the largest rocket ever built or flown, to be fully reusable and to lift more cargo for less cost into orbit. Starship is considered crucial for the company’s goal to vastly expand its Starlink satellite network, among other missions.
About 18 minutes into Friday’s test flight, SpaceX began to deploy 20 of its new Starlink V3 satellites into orbit, a first chance for the company to see how they performed in flight. All 20 satellites were successfully deployed and were intended to burn up and come out of orbit within about 20 minutes.
Friday’s test flight marked the second for Starship V3, the latest version of the rocket.
The new satellites, produced at a SpaceX facility in Redmond, Washington, are built to be larger, and more powerful than Starlink’s earlier satellites. They’re also equipped with solar arrays that generate twice as much power as prior generations, a SpaceX business analyst explained in a livestream.
SpaceX is now developing Starmind satellites, which the company intends to launch and eventually use as orbital data centers.
Besides using their largest rockets to launch the new, larger satellites, SpaceX wants to use the Starship rocket to bring U.S. astronauts back to the moon’s surface, and to eventually power manned missions to Mars. The company is preparing Starship for a major NASA test flight next year.
In a post on X, which is owned by SpaceX, the company said it delayed an earlier test flight planned for Thursday “due to weather.” It also previously scrubbed a test flight on July 16, after the rocket’s booster triggered a hold, which “shut down the engines right as they were starting to ignite,” a SpaceX employee said during a livestream of the earlier event.
SpaceX’s stock has dropped in four of the past five weeks, slumping 43% from its peak close on June 16.
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