San Francisco Frontiers - SpaceX puts Starship megarocket in orbit for first time

The black-and-silver behemoth, standing more than 120 meters (131 yards) tall, rose through a thick cloud of smoke on an ambitious 14th test flight.

The upper stage separated from the Super Heavy booster and reached orbit about 26 minutes into flight.

During the test, expected to last about 10 hours, the experimental rocket's upper stage is set to orbit Earth several times and deploy 26 next-generation Starlink satellites.

As a precaution, the spacecraft was launched on a suborbital trajectory and -- after some back-and-forth -- the launch team decided to perform a second burn to reach orbit.

"Starship is orbital," announced one member of the launch team, as cheers rang out.

Satellite deployment began minutes later.

Previous Starship tests, all conducted on safer, less demanding suborbital trajectories, had ended in spectacular explosions, including over the Caribbean.

- 28,000 km/h -

The latest test flight, coming three months after SpaceX's high-profile stock market debut, aims to accelerate development of the largest and most powerful rocket ever designed.

After several years of development and testing in Texas, SpaceX began flying Starship in its full configuration in 2023 and has since made numerous modifications through the successes and failures of successive tests.

But enormous technical challenges remain before Starship, which Musk wants to make fully reusable, can conduct commercial flights, deploy data centers in orbit or reach the Moon or the Red Planet.

With this new test, SpaceX hopes to usher in an "exciting new phase" of development that will include, among other things, tests of refueling the rocket in orbit.

The second burn to reach orbit is "the hardest part," requiring "more forces and more complex calculations," explained Kathleen Curlee, a senior analyst at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, before the launch.

To reach the necessary altitude and speed, "the rocket has to do different things when it's experiencing different levels of gravity," she told AFP.

On this flight, SpaceX is aiming for a circular orbit about 275 km (171 miles) above the Earth, requiring a speed of about 28,000 km/hour.

Once in orbit, the spacecraft began deploying next-generation Starlink satellites designed to expand the company's already massive satellite internet constellation.

- Public expectations -

The plan calls for the rocket to finish its journey in the Pacific Ocean after orbiting the Earth six times.

The huge first-stage booster, called "Super Heavy," fell shortly after launch into waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

From an engineering point of view, "just achieving flight and getting data" would be considered a success, Curlee said.

But spectators and investors have different expectations.

"They need to have flashy tests" because anything less would be seen as a failure, she added.

The development of Starship has faced repeated delays, and a Chinese company has recently made progress in the field of reusable rockets.

Still, SpaceX continues to dominate the global space launch market, thanks to its partially reusable Falcon rockets, and has made risk-taking its mantra.

Whether or not it is successful, this 14th test flight will be followed the same week by three other SpaceX rocket launches, one of which will carry a crew of astronauts to the International Space Station.

Q.Nelson--SFF